It was a miscreant’s feast that day in the harbor, the guts of the ruptured galley spilling over the sand like a defeated army. Boxes of wax slabs, sheets of tin, coiled wire; a hundred sopping yards of Aqualest wool; glittering shards of glass daubed with precious drops of perfume, solvent, dye, tinctures, spirits. A single unbroken flask of tanner’s eyebright. Seventeen splay-ribbed barrels that had yielded their fermented nectar to the sea at the behest of the rocky shore, and another two dozen kegs stinking of spoilt beer.
It wasn’t the wreckers who took the first prizes. They’d had no hand in the ship’s demise, and were in fact sleeping the deep sleep of the sated only two days after they’d brought down their last victim. It wasn’t the fishers either, who ordinarily would have seen the foundering ship long before the ship could see the shore, for they’d been away already a fortnight on the great herringers in a distant northern sea. And it wasn’t the lonely children hunting for a meal, or escaping from the too freely given blows of their elders, though they would be released from the pinioning gaze of their schoolmaster in time to be the second to plunge eager hands into the ship’s generous gifts.
No, the first was myself, of course. It’s the only reason for my telling this story, and I do have a purpose — bear with me — in telling it the way I have. I’m not a miscreant, or at least not the usual kind. I’m not a thief, or at least not always. I’m a vagrant, a wanderer, an itinerant fortune teller.
I saw the ship that morning from my sandy bed upon the heath. A solitary scrap of sail fluttered like a disconsolate hand from the very top of the broken mast. I knew nothing of ships, but a cold chill echoed through my heart. No mortal could have survived whatever force had taken apart that construction of wood and iron. It heeled one way and then another as it approached the shore, as if in its final moments it agonized over which stretch of yellow sand would make the softest bier to rest upon. I watched, the way one watches the dysrythmic fluttering of a dying bird, fascinated by the movement toward flight and continuity that starts and starts over, but never finds its place and must start again.
Futile.
I didn’t walk down to the beach until the outgoing tide threw up the contents of the ship, one wet-shiny piece at a time. The corner of a sand-swamped box, a sliver of glass reflecting the sun like a tiny beacon, a muddy wad of wool, the lucky bauble of tanner’s eyebright — and the only article among that sorry mass of lost and found wealth that intrigued me enough to draw my bare feet across the stinging heath and into the icy water.
It was a book. A glyph book. I recognized its metal clasp even from across the distance of the waste, as the contorted shape stamped into its unblemished brass seemed to rise above it, dancing like a smoky flame. I recognized it. I’d seen it once before, many years ago. It had been possessed by a rag man, a wanderer, a man very like myself — or perhaps it had possessed him. He told me it held a secret no man wanted to know: the circumstances of his own death.
I hadn’t believed him. I’d still been a young man then, and death had seemed like a foreign thing, a word divorced from ordinary language. Glyph books were of this world, and served only their true masters, and death couldn’t touch so harmless an art. Better tell your tale to the bone-casters and the skin-lifters, the white-eyed devotees of a truth revealed only after a lifetime of oaths and sacrifices. Glyph readers were a new order, a simpler order, and we’d have no truck with any mixing of the two. I’d sent him away.
And now here it was. Thirty years later, and me half a world away from where I’d been, and barren of book and craft and home and my next meal. I can’t tell the story now of my fall from grace, but only that I couldn’t — even had the home and meal been proffered in exchange — refuse the lure of that twisting glyph, that abomination of language, a fusion of the words “yield” and “conquer.”
I walked down to the beach. The book was trapped beneath the remains of the crate in which it had been housed, an iron-bound thing wrenched from its moorings and overflowing with saturated straw. I worried it with a trembling hand, dislodging a splintered board that pierced my skin and let my blood mix with the sea, drop by drop, until I’d freed my prize.
I sat where I was, in the wet sand, with the tide sucking at my bare ankles, and ran my fingers over the battered green leather of the book. It wasn’t oxhide as I’d assumed all those years ago, it was something thinner and yet more resilient, its discolorations only temporary blemishes. I could wipe them away with my hands, and I did, its surface smooth, untorn. Whole. Even after its disaster at sea, it felt after a few moments of care, as if I’d just lifted it from the hallowed shelves of that great underground library.
I walked away, leaving behind the recoverable Aqualest wool, a yard of which would have fed and housed me for a month, and the tanner’s eyebright that wouldn’t have fooled a half-penny shill but would have served a fishwyfe in exchange for a suit of clothes and a pair of shoes, and the tin and the wax, and the coiled wire, the former salvageable for an extravagant price in the inland towns, though the latter’s value had already been greatly diminished by the salt sea. I walked away, back through the heath even as the sharp voices of children echoed up from the gap that separated the coastal village from the shore, as the first of the wreckers woke from dismal sleep, and the herringer fleet turned back toward home with holds near to bursting with their harvest.
The contours of the glyph brushed across my hand like thread, or fine hair. They drew with them lines of fate that clung to them, weighed them down, thickened them into tendrils, vines. I couldn’t turn away from the story they told. The children all, sickened by the dye that had leaked into the sand, would perish that night in their mothers’ arms. The wreckers would trade their unlooked-for boon to a betrayer who would sell them to the lord’s warden, and every man and woman among them would be hanged. The herringers, already bearing for home, would fall afoul of an embargo, and disease and starvation would claim them in a long embrace.
Only one miscreant who had scavenged from the emptied belly of the doomed ship would survive long enough to tell the tale. Myself, of course.
For I am Skyborn, and this is my story.
July 7, 2016
