As Waters Cover

As Waters Cover

by Lancelot Schaubert

“Giving that scythe—” Mar said.

He wasn’t listening.

She was droopy-eyed and slouching, but beautiful: hoping to haggle for more time to surf. Mourners got in the way of that. She cleared her throat. “Giving that scythe statue a present isn’t going to keep you from dying."

“Of course it will,” Fard said, eyes still closed, head rising. “Theirs are the ones who slay us, theirs we must pacify.” He bowed towards the silver scythe again.

She laughed and shook her head. “If God’s a scythe, we’re in trouble.”

“If not, who will save us from invaders?”

She asked, “Like when the Tilons finally come?”

“Myths,” he said. The field of great stone sickles, a sculpture garden of tall and narrow idols, spread out before them grassy atop the white bonestone crag.

“No they’re not,” she said, “they have long teeth and longer claws and pounce silently and fly like the great thunderbirds that swoop down and catch the young swimmers during their training lessons. They–”

“Listen to you,” Fard said, “worried about some fairy tale and forbidding me my sacrifices.” He threw more food, more spare change, flung more incense smoke from out of that hanging chain meat smoker he wielded, flinging the growing fog towards the hand-carved representation of a scythe, of the sickleman. “Keep up your surfing and fairy tales if you think it will help our people with the sicklemen, but as for me and my house we will appease them and placate them by all means available to us.”

She snorted at him. “You act like they’re demons.”

He turned a worried glance her way. His brow darkened. Then he turned back and slung more incense towards the statue.

“You think they’re demons?” she laughed. “Bro… this is rich. This is too rich, man. Really?”

He muttered, “Do you have a better explanation for a hoard of man-sized creatures, robed in shadow, carrying harvest blades to cut us down and nothing sticking out beneath those black curtains covering them but the tiniest thousands of legs?”

One passed by in the overhang.

Mar and Fard froze.

It passed on to inspect someone else, no sound but the soft fluttering of the blackened cloak like the soft fluttering of the skirt under a king’s long table at a queen’s quiet funeral.

“See,” Fard said. “You fear them too. All I want is to liberate our people towards a good life by giving gifts their tyrants desire.”

“Sounds boring,” she said. “I’m fine without any of that.”

“You have no farm,” he said.

“So?”

“You don’t have your harvests interrupted by these creatures,” Fard said. “You don’t have entire years wiped out in a moment so that you have to scrape by, year after year, hoping that the collectors won’t come and claim your work, debts called in, leagues and leagues of farmwaves repossessed, and then no money left for… for…” he started to cry a little and tried not to. He started to weep a little and tried to make it a cry. He lost control and it was a messy thing to watch.

She remembered his daughter, the great bellowing cough that had developed like the bark of the whale spiders, how much the medicine ran. She’d never connected it before. “Fard, I…”

“Don’t,” he said. “One year. One year of uninterrupted harvest and everything will be alright.”

“You just need to rest, man. This whole damn planet needs to just relax more: we literally live on or near the largest waves in the known universe and here you’re worried about growing berries on them.”

“It’s not the berries. It’s the freedom berries could bring.”

She remembered how her mom had come in from the tiger island (each island on their planet was named for a different species of animal – some common to The Vale, some uncommon) and married her father from the ant island. Neither of them knew how to have a good time, at least not in Mar’s experience. Her mother spent most of her time telling stories of how she’d once been the nanny of some famous sea captain who had passed a recommendation along so that she could work on dry land, a recommendation to one of the famous chestdancers, where she worked also as a nanny taking care of those kids and her various household chores and the administrative duties that come with helping the lead of a major island show – all of the logistics of moving sets and costumes by longboat from island to island, it was quite the ordeal.

Her father had been no different, though he appeared drastically different. Systems engineer, businessman, the kind of nerdy monotone you only expected from bad actors employing stereotypes about accountants from the ant island. Turns out sometimes stereotypes exist for a reason: a quick representation of realities that do, more or less, exist in the majority of a given demographic. In his case, number scratchers and tallymen from the isle of ants. Mom and dad had married, seemingly different, but ultimately mutually convinced that the best way to raise their daughter was away from a moment’s peace or relaxation. Combined with her naturally phlegmatic persona and rebellious streak, the overenforced environment turned Mar into a runner early on. She never ran far: only towards the nearest breakers and boomers. She wanted to get the rest of the planet to enjoy what she enjoyed: that kind of abiding rest. Not the uncreative idleness of her father — the ant who worked diligently and yet mindlessly. Not the slavish workaholism of her mother. The two had collided enough to separate and she needed not something else, a third way. True rest. And she wondered if the thing she’d seen a year back was an omen. Or a key.

“You going to just stand there staring at my worship or are you going to make a sacrifice?” Fard asked.

She’d never noticed his muscles before, the scars on his arms. Stronger and more cut up than a farmer. Strong and scarred like the humanoid arms of whatever those insectoid sicklemen looked like beneath. She turned and looked out over the crags, the high places where folks left their best (or lied and said they left their best) for the sicklemen to come and claim.

“Well?” he asked again.

“Shh,” she said, “something’s moving on the horizon.”

He turned from the altar and looked the way that she peered. They both watched as a swarm of something – of many thousands of somethings – descended in the east and sped towards them in a very detail-laden cloud: these were not insects, but monsters. Some sort of large monsters and thousands of them.

Fard said, “What in the cutting name of–”

“We have to get them into the seacaves,” Mar said and she took off running without waiting for him to respond. “To the caves!” she shouted at a crowd of hilltop shepherds. “Run to the seacaves” she shouted at a group of young women who, until then, had gossiped about suitors and styles and search parties for drowned children. Some glanced her way and scoffed. Others perked up for a moment and then returned to their business.

Finally she climbed up on top of a rounded off bonestone and shouted “THEY ARE COMING TO EAT YOU ALL!” while pointing towards the swarms and swarms of winged monster things that had now descended upon them all: massive men and women with hair like antennae and tentacles and red tattoos of cave drawings all over their half-naked forms riding the backs of great red and black-spotted leopards with wings. The leopards dove down to move among them and started grasping up small children within their jaws, the bones and blood of which slathered over the field in a red and debris-ridden foam.

The people screamed and moved to hide in the caves in the rocks and holes in the ground, and followed Mar into the seacaves along the great spire of bonestone like a great hornet’s or parrot’s nest, the sort that betrays its hollowness on its porous surface, the sort that normally can only be accessed from the bottom. They dove in as higher and higher up the great bone stone crag, the winged leopard beasts landed to hunt them.

They chased them, followed them into the rocks and into the holes in the ground and they left great piles of clothes and limbs in their wake, a ruthless force, and Mar did what she could to get the women and the children and the wimpy men into a safe haven, rally as many of the fighters as she could (there were spare few with the people due to the decade of sickleman oppression) and then went to find Fard.

Who was hiding in the shadow of the same statue, praying all the more fervently and sacrificing there on the top of the great crag with the shadows of great winged leopards diving around him to take and eat as they pleased from the flesh of Mar and Fard’s people.

Mar opened her mouth but was cut off by Fard.

“You’re lazy,” Fard said. He did not rise.

“What are you talking about? The Tilons are here, we–”

“You’re lazy in your devotion to the sicklemen. They can stop this pain.”

“By making more pain.”

“Their pain brings the rest we deserve.”

“Really?” she asked. “This is not my idea of rest either, Fardome Renoirpe.”

“Death is a kind of rest.”

“Death is a kind of judgement.

“Yes,” he said, “but which of God’s judgements are not also gifts?”

The sky cleared around them as the majority of the winged leopards and their riders took to running and hunting and rooting. They had mostly passed over Mar and Fard and the field of the scythe idols.

Mar said, “I feel like my mind might break.”

“So let it break or go escape to your waves. Or maybe help me bring about liberality to the people with our idols.”

“Your idols. I don’t worship stone.”

“Yeah, you just try to manipulate spirits in vain. Enough food and the sicklemen will be gracious — see how they’ve abandoned their homes and storehouses?”

“The sicklmen,” she said. “That’s it. How do you know so much about the sicklemen, Fard?”

“I know very little.”

“Don’t feed me that.”

“I know more than some from a more devout devotion, a long obedience in the same direction, that is all.”

She picked up his forearms with delicate little hands, surfer hands that had been well seasoned by sun and saltwater and board wax brine. “Then how did these get bigger than a farmer’s in all the weird places? And how did you get scars like theirs?”

He eyed her.

“Fard?”

The noise in the distance of his people dying awoke him. “My father went through the rite early and became a sickleman. He’s one of them and I nearly joined too, but reformed after witnessing what they did to our people.”

“And you give money and food to them?!”

“I have hope for my father and loyalty to him and hope he has enough sway to have mercy on me and mine. And maybe to free us one day.”

“But your mind changes to run like theirs when you go over to them. You become like a giant bug, I hear. Like the giant ants of the island of my father’s youth.”

“A man can hope for his father’s redemption. Can’t even a wayward elder change? Can’t God change a leopard’s spots?”

She didn’t know if God could change a fingerprint, a snowflake, the spots on a leopard. But these leopards needed a change and quickly. “I don’t know, she said, but I know how to kill these.”

“How?”

She thought of the omen, the key. “I once saw two sicklemen take two of these down. One with the scythe, one with a mutesheer.”

“A mutesheer?”

“He cut out the leopard’s tongue when it went to bite him and the thing either bled out or drowned on its own blood, but it wasn’t able to bite. Tell me, where do the sicklemen live?”

“We are not to say.”

“Where? Fard if you care about freedom for your people, you’ll let me unleash the sicklemen on these things.”

“In the deep of the mountain where we ought not to go.”

“In the third strata?”

“Yes. Beyond the sphere door.”

“Help me open it,” she said.

“No.”

“Fard.”

“I won’t. It’ll be the death of us.”

“It already is,” she said, “Look around you.”

The last of their people were falling every which way.

“There’s only one way into the lock antechamber. You won’t be able to steer the people.”

“I’ll talk to our captains. What is the way?”

He pointed out to sea where a great boomer was forming, massive in scale. It would collide halfway up the towering crags of the island: a wave the size of the mountain.

Mar grinned. “At least the tide is high.”

“You must thread the needle. Too high or low and it will crush you.”

“I’ll be fine. And you?”

“I do it nightly, my dear.”

They told the plan to the captain and then had the longboats bring them around to the spawning zone where the waves would form. They could read waves well, most of the folk from their nation, and knew the difference between the seedbed of a small wave and the seedbed of something gargantuan. Three waves deep, it rumbled beneath them in a way only a currentseer could understand. They paddled and got ahead of it with their boards and caught it, riding it like a snow skier might ride a mountain’s ever-renewing avalanche. The thing moved them at breakneck speeds – faster than anything Mar had caught before, pulling them on and over with an inertia sure to squash them flat and turn their bodies to pomace from sea and stone turned cider press.

“YOU WILL HAVE TO JUMP AND SWIM FOR IT!” he shouted over the roar, pointing towards a tiny hole in the wall.

“I’M NOT AS TALL AS YOU!” she shouted back.

The opening came before them, a great mouth in the wall of white bonestone, and he jumped off his board and into the hole and swam along inside the airborne current that blasted in, his flesh like fire in the water in the sky in the stone.

She had caught the wave at a perfect crest and had surfed through the mouth, through the tunnel-turned estuary, and right up beside the inner shore near the control booth near the spheredoor. She pressed on the primitive controls and could see along the inner tracks the door mechanism begin to move, ball and track.

Through the porthole in the wall that allowed watchers to guard the entrance to the door, she could see the captains shepherding her people to the left and right to the tunnels that turned to either side of the door of the deep, turned to loop into deeper hideouts and boltholes. They sprinted along quite quickly and cleared the door – all but a few – while the hordes and hordes of winged leopards and alien riders climbed down the walls as quickly as would mountain goats, darting a bit slower than they had from the air after the well-adapted people.

Fard had come behind Mar and moved a series of levers so that the inner track of the spheredoor shifted. The great ball rolled down the inner hill in the space between the inner and outer walls, opening that which should not be opened in the place they ought not have gone.

Then the sicklemen came forth – hundreds and hundreds of centipeded or milipeded bodies hiding behind those old and dark-veiled shadowcloaks, drawing up scythes as one might draw ten thousand slings and tearing into the leopards and riders as the leopards and riders tore into them. Great mutesheers came out and they began to cut out the tongues of the monsters even as the riders moved to ride and strangle the sicklemen. The voices of ten thousand demiurges and elder gods went silent as more piled in to war.

“It’s foolish to wait to see how this ends,” Fard said. “To watch them eat each other.”

“I find it entertaining,” she pulled out some peanuts from a pocket. They were soggy.

“Until they turn on the audience,” he said.

The realization hit her. She looked at him.

His expression practically begged her to get out of there as quickly as possible, to leave before the devils knew they were there.

“Where can we go?” she asked.

“You mentioned your parents.”

“My mother’s slavery is as bad or worse.”

“Then with your father.”

“He’s boring.”

“Boring’s a nice change from this,” Fard said, “especially for my daughter.”

“Good point,” Mar said.

“Plus with our people, we can teach them how to have a good time.”

“You’ll never get that old accountant on a surfboard, but I’ll cheer you on if you try.”

“It’s better than trying to stay here and respond to the violence of either side. It’s a binding, for sure, to commit to your father’s island.”

“Especially if my mother hasn’t died yet,” she said, “and they’re still together.”

Fard said, “But it’s the sort of binding vow that might free even me.”

“At least you won’t have to waste smoked meat anymore. How do we get down?”

He pointed to surfboards and wakeboards lying all along the inside of the control room. “Same way we came in.”

It took them a moment to redirect the people, but they did it quickly and the islanders — even the children — had prepared just for this. How many have ever seen a city of paupers cover the waves of the deep with their boards as waters cover the sea?