5. Nerina
NERINA
The water changes before the island is fully visible.
I notice it in the feel of it beneath the hull first, the swell flattening, the rhythm shifting from the long open-ocean roll to the shorter chop of shallow water, the way water behaves when land is close enough to interrupt it.
Then the color. In the thin gray light before dawn the sea around the ‘Tenacious’ has gone from deep green-black to a color I have no name for that sits below the surface rather than on it, as though the water here has depth that goes further down than depth should go.
Looking at it directly is a mistake.
The temperature has dropped again. Not the functional cold of open water at night but a considered cold, with intent behind it, and the air that comes off the island as I draw closer carries a mineral sharpness — volcanic rock and something older underneath, something that has been here longer than the rock.
Bloodstorm Peak is fully visible now, the fog having pulled back from its immediate coastline the way fog pulls back from fire.
It is larger than it looked from a distance.
Not surprising, but still briefly terrible.
The cliffs that form its outer edge are black basalt, sheer and wet, rising from the water at angles that suggest the island emerged from the sea already angry about it.
Above the cliffs the terrain climbs in stages — jagged ridgeline, dense treeline, and above that the peak itself, still crowned in its permanent weather, the clouds turning slowly in a pattern that has nothing to do with the wind at this altitude.
I read the coastline the way I have learned to read everything that might kill me: methodically, without letting myself react until I have the full picture.
The cliffs dominate the northern and eastern faces.
The western approach, which is the one the fog corridor has delivered me to, is less sheer, the basalt here has broken down over time into something lower, and at the base of the lower rock face I can see, in the growing light, a stretch of black sand beach perhaps two hundred yards long.
Sheltered on both sides by rock formations that curl out into the water like fingers. Accessible.
Barely accessible. But accessible.
I adjust the heading and bring the ‘Tenacious’ around toward it.
The approach takes longer than I would like because I take it slowly, the only responsible way to take an unknown coastline in a damaged brig in the dark.
I go to the bow and read the water by the way it moves around submerged rock, nudging the wheel in small increments, feeling for the bottom with everything I have learned about how water behaves when it is running shallow.
Twice I feel the hull graze rock beneath the surface and my heart seizes and I compensate and keep moving.
The third graze is the bottom shelving up to meet me.
I run the ‘Tenacious’ up onto the shore at a walking pace, feeling the hull lift and settle and lift and settle as the shallows slow me, and then the bow finds the beach properly and the brig shudders to a stop with the particular finality of something that has arrived and knows it.
I stand at the wheel for a moment in the sudden quiet.
Then I go below.
The patched hull takes twenty minutes to inspect properly and the news is better than I expected and worse than I hoped.
The standard result of inspecting things you have been trying not to think about.
The repair is holding. The split plank has not opened further despite the grounding.
There is water in the bilge but there is always water in the bilge and the level is not rising.
The only question that matters. I pump it down to manageable and come back up into the gray dawn and get the lines.
I run two from the bow to a rock formation on the beach’s northern edge — old volcanic basalt, thick around as my waist, going nowhere.
Two more from the stern to a spur of rock at the waterline on the southern side.
When the tide comes back it will lift the hull and the lines will hold her true and I will not be twisted sideways in the surf and I will not drift.
This is the best I can do alone and it will have to be enough.
I put my hand on the hull before I go ashore.
“Stay,” I say. “I’ll be back.”
I drop over the side into water that comes to my knees and walk up onto the black sand of Bloodstorm Peak.
The island feels different under my feet than any ground I have stood on before, though I cannot immediately say how.
The sand is black and fine and cold and wet, volcanic grit the same everywhere, and the rock formations are rock formations, and the treeline fifty yards up the beach is trees.
Nothing announces itself as supernatural.
Nothing glows or breathes or reaches for me.
And yet.
There is a quality to the air here that I noticed from the water and notice more acutely now, a density, a weight, as though the island has more presence per square foot than land is supposed to have.
The kind of feeling I associate with walking into a room and realizing someone was just in it, the particular aliveness of recently occupied space.
Except that the island has this quality everywhere I step and in every direction I face, and it does not diminish as I move further up the beach.
The island is awake. I do not know how I know this, but I know it the way I know weather coming, in the body before the mind catches up.
Setting out the bedroll from the supply chest when the first voice comes.
It is not a sound exactly. It arrives the way certain memories arrive, not recalled so much as suddenly present, occupying the same space as current thought.
A man’s voice, harbor-rough, with the particular sneer of a drunk who has decided the woman nearest to him is a reasonable target for the evening’s surplus contempt.
Weak, weathered woman, out here on your own? Surprised you made it past the harbor mouth.
I know that voice. Not specifically — there is no face attached, no incident I can pin it to, but I know its type with my whole body, the way you know a sound that has been aimed at you enough times that you stop hearing it consciously and start feeling it instead.
The docks have been full of that voice my entire life.
I keep unrolling the bedroll.
Is that fish I smell, or something worse? Someone ought to tell her. As a courtesy.
Laughter. Several voices now, the kind of group laughter that is really just one person’s cruelty amplified by the number of people willing to echo it. I have eaten this sound for breakfast for eight years. I am intimately familiar with its nutritional value: none.
Pretty enough, maybe, if you scraped the dock off her. Though the scars—
“Yes,” I say, out loud, to the beach and the air and whatever is behind both of them. “I have scars. I am aware of the scars. I received most of them doing work that none of you were capable of. Next.”
The voices shift. A different register now, smoother, the merchant tone I know just as well, the voice that appraises rather than jeers, which I have always found marginally worse because it thinks itself more civilised.
I’ve got a mackerel you can clean. Since you’re here. Make yourself useful.
The cold of the island sharpens around me, pressing in at the edges of my coat, finding the gaps. The treeline seems closer than it was. The dark between the trees is absolute and dense and has a quality of attention to it that I leave unexamined.
I am very tired. I am past the point where tired is a sensation and into the territory where it is simply the medium I exist in, the water I swim through. My shoulders are a statement of grievance I no longer have the energy to read. My hands have not been properly warm since I left Blackwake.
The voices press.
Thought she was going somewhere. Look at her. End of the world and she’s still got fish guts under her fingernails.
What did you think was going to happen, dock girl? What exactly did you think you were going to find out here?
And underneath those, quieter, the one that knows where the soft places are:
He’s already gone. You know that. You just couldn’t say it out loud.
I stop.
I sit down on the shore with my bedroll half-unrolled beneath me and my elbows on my knees and I breathe. In and out. The cold air tastes of salt and sulfur and deep time. The voices wait with the patience of things that have been doing this for a very long time and are not in any hurry.
I look up at the treeline. At the dark between the trees that are watching me.
“Right,” I say. “Fuck. Okay. I just came through a fog bank, then a storm, then whatever that approach was, and now I’ve got dock voices in my head and something in the trees watching me and I am—” I stop.
Breathe. “I am too tired for this tonight. Whatever this is. Rain check. We’ll do the whole—” I gesture at the treeline, at the air, at the general situation of the island and its apparent opinions.
“—all of this, in the morning. When I have slept. Right now I am lying down.”
I pull the bedroll flat and lie down on the cold ground with my coat pulled over my shoulders and my knife where my hand can find it and the sound of the water working at the ‘Tenacious’ hull in the dark behind me.
The voices do not return.
I do not know if that is because the island has accepted the arrangement or because I have simply stopped being available to them. I decide it doesn’t matter. Either way I am horizontal and that is an improvement on everything that has preceded it.
I am almost asleep when I feel it, the quality of attention from the treeline shifting, sharpening from observation into something considering action.
A presence. One that was here before I arrived and will be here when I wake and is currently making no move toward me and no sound and has no form that I can see in the dark.
I keep my hand on the knife.
I close my eyes.
The island breathes around me, slow and old and not yet decided about what to do with what the sea has delivered to its shore.