Aur Child

Village Elder Muddear Gallia-Tiul had returned to Alai-Tiul’s cottage to find it empty. After the shocking discovery of the two bodies – mother and son – she had rushed to engage the drapier and have the pyre prepared as quickly as possible. She had wanted to perform these tasks herself to minimize rumors startling the villagers, but Gallia had known she must be available to console Alai. She also had her suspicions about what had happened, that seafood collected from Crabber’s Bay might have been exposed to the fallout of the Aur child implosions. But that would need more investigation. Meanwhile, that kind, inquisitive soul, husband, and father, would be crushed and in need of the tender care from the one person who now knew him best. She also wanted to be certain that the man did not blame himself for what had happened.

Unfortunately, she had been held up by reports of several more villagers stricken terribly ill. Fear crawled its way through the village. Upon the new reports, she confirmed her suspicions. A common theme – and Gallia was insightful enough to ask – was the consumption of fish caught in Crabber’s Bay since the heavy rains two days earlier. With saddening, rushed attempts to comfort those other families with sick members, and to insist that no other seafood is eaten, she pulled herself away and finally returned to Alai’s coquina cottage. But he was not there.

“Where is Alai, Bemko?” she asked the large man who she found standing behind the house facing the sea. His wet cheeks suggested he had recently been crying, again. Alai’s dog paced anxiously beside the man’s legs.

“Oh, Elder Tiul, I’m so sorry.” He murmured with heavy eyes. “I went to bury that clay pot deep in the forest like you asked me. Alai took to the sea, like a leaf through the branches. I saw his mast over thataway but thought he was already far gone.

“No!” Gallia gasped, causing Bemko to stiffen his shoulders. “You let him leave?”

Bemko sniffed his nose against his sleeve. “Maybe, I thought, he might just want some time on his own after all that happened today.”

“How long ago was it you last saw his mast, Bemko?”

“Before the moon came up. At least.”

She looked along the shoreline, her brow furrowed. “You’ve just stood here? What of your boat?”

“No, I never use that boat myself, Elder Tiul.” He scratched his head, uneasy with the conversation. “Best I keep to land nowadays. I’ve just been keepin’ an eye on him from here and, you know what, I remembered that children’s song again. You know, the one I was tellin’ you about the other day? I would swear that it was actually a psalm from Our Order, you know?”

Gallia didn’t stay to listen to the man’s petty ponderings. She marched into the shed and saw the work bench loaded with combinations of circuits and electrical devices. There was a space in the center of the bench around which all the circuitry converged, yet all that was there was a charred mesh shroud that twinkled from a few places in the weak light. She looked at it with a puzzled expression on her face, another unexplained object. She looked around but could not find what she sought.

He has taken it with him!

In less than twenty minutes, she was at the harbor to engage the fisherman Gorian Ciobe-Nemla to search for Alai. He was just heading out when she came rumbling down the hill on her bicycle, far faster than a person of so many decades should go, calling out to him.

“What has happened now, Gallia?” Elder Jange-Nemla asked. She had just delivered instructions to Gorian to retrieve his nets and discard any new catch.

“Alai set off to sea.” She set her bicycle down against the low wall beside the quay, and then, in a low voice intended only for her fellow elder, “He has taken the Aur child with him.”

“Oh, Gallia,” the other woman said, “Our star reminds us daily of its massive presence.”

Gallia noticed how, for the first time, the scripture rang hollow.

“Would you call the others to assembly?”

Jange nodded slowly as she turned to carry out her assignment. “A second in one week? Are we no longer blessed?”

Gallia ignored her. She approached the fisherman who stood beside his boat.

“We must search to the northwest for Alai-Tiul, Gorian.”

“Okay, but I wouldn’t want to be out more than sight of the wind towers, Elder Tiul.”

“No, we will not go that far, hopefully.” As Gorian helped her over the gunwale into the boat, she said, “Thank you for your generosity.”

“It is not just generosity, Elder Tiul. We all have an obligation to one another.” He removed the thick lines from around a pylon and shoved the boat off the quay. “A villager lost must be found, I would say.”

“Yes, we will sail in that direction until we are just about to lose sight of the towers. Let us hope we don’t return empty handed.”

The afternoon sun had exhausted itself and the moon had risen before dark. The small ketch raced before a shore breeze that built up as the warm sea sucked the air out of the cooling forests. Sails were full and the sheets were tight. Gallia gazed far beyond the ship’s bow, desperately searching for the tip of a tiny-masted boat. They did not exchange any words. Gorian seemed focused on his duties, although a man of his experience could sail his ship half asleep if he liked.

Gallia struggled with her recent actions. Did she do the right thing by giving Alai the responsibility to return the Aur child to her? It would have been more prudent to come and take it from him, but she had acted to protect him, too. To have him return the Aur child on his own accord, she reminded herself, was intended to make it clear to others that it was not a theft. No, he had found the Aur child, sought out its rightful owner, and returned it. That was the plan. The elders had agreed it would have attracted too much attention to go there and take it. After all, they had reasoned that it was, perhaps, safer with Alai than in the cave.

The waves grew larger beyond the bay. Gallia held on tightly to the side of the boat as it rose up and dove down the hills of swell. The wind towers were still visible, but just their top halves. The land had disappeared behind the horizon and the evening overcame the afternoon to bring a new dullness to the darkening seas.

Gorian studied the wispy clouds. “Winds’r changin’ this far out,” he said. It sounded like a grumble.

“Not much further,” Gallia had just said to Gorian, when the latter slammed the boat to starboard, assuming a broad reach.

“What is it?” Gallia called out, the wind now in their right ears and blowing hard.

“I, I can’t say. Thought I’d seen a ship or something just ahead.”

Gallia turned her head to look in the direction of their previous course. The heavy seas only allowed distances beyond the next trough to be seen intermittently. In every direction, they seemed to be at the low point, as if they were at the bottom of a large valley. The flashing lights of the wind towers became visible only when they rose upon the crest of a wave.

Suddenly, Gallia saw it too. She caught only a glimpse before it disappeared, but its tall mast remained in her view. Something like a ship, but then, nothing she ever knew. Long, low, and sleek. Black but also translucent. Visible and then not. Not just a tall mast, but a massive one, rising high up into the steel sky, with a large globe at its head and what appeared to be eyes jeering down at her. One moment, it loomed large just ahead of them, and in the next, it seemed to vanish, turning invisible.

Gorian blanched. “In all my days!” he yelled in a shaky voice over the rush of waves and foam, “I never believed those stories about ghost ships to be real.”

Gallia searched for an excerpt from Our Order to calm his fears – and hers – but was lost for words. The small fishing boat reached across the wind on an aggressive tack. Her last chance to find Alai, and the Aur child, had been interrupted by this monster of the seas. She wanted Gorian to return to their original course, but she didn’t dare ask. More than the vague glimpse of a that hawklike ship, she was startled by how fast it was approaching.

“Elder Tiul, we should turn back,” Gorian called to Gallia as he pulled in the sheet and assumed a tight tack towards the intermittently visible wind towers.

“Yes,” she finally croaked, “Yes, we must abandon this …” but she did not say what it was that was happening. She couldn’t. Because at that moment, she noticed that the ghost ship had appeared behind them. It was the steel sky. Two bows straddled their small boat, careening down over their mast. It seemed to Gallia that a gargantuan mouth was attempting to swallow them like a tuna fish would a mackerel.

The pursuing ship did not just loom large. It rose on thin blades that pierced perpendicularly into the water. The bluster of the enormous ship stalled Gorian’s sails. One of the blades lifted to reveal a colossal foil wrapped inward beneath the ship. In that new configuration, the ghost ship rocketed forward with unimaginable acceleration, sweeping above them and toppling Gorian’s meager wooden mast with an instant crack. Sail and rigging tore and collapsed to the deck in confused tatters all about them.

Gallia saw their fate laid bare before her eyes. They would be crushed. Squeezed beneath the steadfast vessel above and shoved down into the gaping sea below. She had seen Gorian pulling at lines and adjusting winches to no avail. Gallia was certain the fisherman’s hands were shaking. She did nothing – she could do nothing – to help the good man. Her thirteen-decade hands gripped feebly at the coaming of the old boat. Her thoughts precipitated to only one; being killed by another was heretofore inconceivable, yet the ship that hovered over them seemed to be able to do so effortlessly. Any moment now, they would be shattered.

Shattered. Just like she had shattered that small tender. Her hand, she thought. Sharkjaw, her scythe. And now, some other scythe had come for her. It was all too obvious. The similar materials of that small tender and this towering ship, the two occurrences just days apart in the same waters, the indisputable causality. What she hath wrought then, the very same hath returned upon her with a vengeance. In all her decades, with all her training, and all her teachings of peace, she could only look helplessly upon what she had instigated. Even she was susceptible to the simplest of vices.

She had been to sea countless times. She had experienced terrible storms. Yet, nature played by rules, she thought. This was not the work of nature. This was the work of man’s emotion. Revenge. A word so foreign, so uncommon to her, she had failed to imagine this as a possibility. Until now. The ship above her, just moments before it would certainly smack them into the sea, had approached with an attitude of aggression, as if it wanted them to see its fury before it positioned itself to smite them down.

Gallia looked at Gorian. A faithful villager who always did what was asked of him. The man had taken her instructions in Crabber’s Bay and again today, as faithful as a dog. This is what it came to. He caught her eyes. He seemed to understand her feelings. But she would not take that chance.

“I am so very sorry, Gorian-Nemla.”

The fisherman nodded and closed his eyes.

The little boat bobbled in its lost momentum; the massive ship hung above them like a boot over a capsized beetle. The seconds dragged on, and Gallia realized she should select a final scripture from which to quote. Something suitable to the circumstances. Something fitting for both herself and Gorian.

Gorian’s hoarse voice broke her train of thought. “Where’d it go?”

Gallia looked behind her. She could not tell how long she had been inside herself hunting for a spiritual euphemism for murder. Our Order simply neglected such a one. And indeed, even at what had certainly been a fatal moment, it suddenly seemed irrelevant. The ghost ship was gone.

An hour later, the fisherman tied off his boat to the quay. Gallia found it peculiar how quick he stepped ashore. The urgent rescue attempt had been well intentioned, but the chances of catching Alai up had always been slim. Gorian had reassured the shaken village elder of that point twice during their otherwise wordless return to port, a struggle in and of itself with half a mast and only a trysail to power them home. He set Gallia safely onto the pier. She climbed the hill with a buzz in her head. When she entered the room where the assembly of elders had been arranged, she noticed that no scripture came to her tongue. She felt strangely vacant.

The air in the dark room felt thick, the evening breeze that flowed through the open doorways failing to carry away the day’s events. Two villagers dead, several others very ill, and now Alai-Tiul had disappeared at sea, possibly taking the last Aur child of the Tiul clan with him. They did not even yet know about the harrowing attack at sea that had debilitated Gorian-Nemla’s boat. Shuffling and whispering above the creaky floorboards intermingled with the chirp of crickets tucked beneath, and a small western mouse scampered through a crack in the coquina wall to escape the unexpected crowd.

A carefully worded eulogy had been crafted before Gallia arrived. The language attempted to explain the mystery of loss to a nervous village. But the most senior of the elders’ arrival immediately brought upon the hall a new silence.

“Do you return with Alai?” Jange-Nemla asked.

“Or the Aur child?” another elder called.

“We return with our lives,” Gallia said. “Nothing more.”

“Our Order is our star. It has begun and ended many lives,” Nallu-Hoenria said, the words surely meant to steady their spirits.

Gallia looked to her sternly. “The sun? No, Nallu. Something else was going to end my life. And Gorian’s. Something that makes a mockery of Our Order.”

“Are we not yet free from those skulking terrors?” Jange asked.

An elder hissed, “Apostates!”

“My guess is that Hill Village is free, yes,” Gallia said. “They now seek the final Aur child of my clan at sea.”

“So, the Aur child is still in danger,” Jange said. “And Alai,” she added.

Gallia nodded her weary head. “Yes, they are both in danger.”

Nallu shook her head. “But what can we do against them? A solitary man, in a tiny boat on the open sea, left to go losting with an artefact of our people unknowingly in tow. They are gone.”

Gallia felt the many barbs in her words.

“Nallu!” Jange said, “They still live. You do not mean that.”

“Of course, I mean it,” she replied, and stood up with one hand held out towards Gallia. She leaned forward and fixed her eyebrows into an angry chevron. “Why did you leave Alai at his most vulnerable hour with a half-wit who can’t even grow a tomato without turning it into an eggplant? Why did you not take the Aur child back from him the moment you learned he had it? Why did you order the ghost ship into Sharkjaw? Why have you allowed that reckless man to meddle with gadgetry beyond our understanding against all our warnings? Why have you left your Aur children in a cave so close to the sea when we have heard so many rumors recently about Apostates on the hunt?”

Now Jange rose to her feet. “That cave has been a safe hiding place for centuries!” Her nose glowed red.

Gallia calmly lifted her hand, “It’s alright, Jange. You do not need to defend my actions. Nallu has a right to ask these questions of me. Surely others wonder the same.”

“The wonder,” Nallu continued, apparently not willing to be stalled by interruptions or conciliatory words, “is that no one else has been lost except those of your own clan, Gallia-Tiul. Let this be a lesson to all of us who play loose with the lessons of Our Order.”

Philosophical disagreements between the two elders had simmered for decades and had now come to a head. Perhaps she was exceedingly nervous about her own Aur children, perhaps her accusations were harshly spoken and carelessly launched at a difficult time – a time just hours before the entire village would stand about a newly constructed pyre to send two young members of Gallia’s clan back into the fires from which they had been born – but that made them no less valid.

Gallia cleared her throat as she pulled herself up. “Indeed, I owe all of you an explanation. Nallu-Hoenria asks why I chose to leave our clan’s Aur children in the cave. The simple answer is that I never imagined them to ever be in such peril. But now I have been proven tragically wrong in that estimation. Two Aur children lost. One more seemingly destined to enslavement by the Apostates. Not artifacts,” she said, looking at Nallu, “but each one a precious soul of our great ancestors. Oh, how my heart aches for their loss.”

Heads turned down rather than toward one another.

“I have also failed to fully recognize the new dangers after losing the Aur children. Yes, we cleared the creek area from villagers, but it took me too long to connect the illnesses of so many villagers to the foods taken from Crabber’s Bay. It took me too long to warn them not to eat of it. Even until early this morning I had not fully made this connection and for that delay, many have suffered.” She shuddered. “I am in agony to think how I wished Alai and his family a good meal from Crabber’s Bay, while I ate contently that fateful night of grouper caught by his hands in the other bay. How could I have been so blind?

“Nallu asks why Alai has been allowed to pursue his interests in defiance of our teachings. I say, defiance of teachings is no crime in Hill Village. Curiosity is no crime. The man was given more space to learn the way of Our Order because he was more curious. Yet I shake now to think that I have failed him in that lesson. Alai-Tiul has been defiant, but he is not wrong in his curiosity. He is right to want to improve our condition, even if we will not oblige. He is right to ask us why we keep these secrets. Perhaps if we were more forthcoming …ah well, what’s done is done. I am certain there is nothing else of which we can find him guilty. He is, after all, a gentle man.”

Many elders nodded and mumbled words of affirmation.

“And what of the ghost ship at Sharkjaw? Sisters,” she said, shaking her head slowly, “that was not a ghost ship. Nay, that was a ghost fledgling. A ghost tender, perhaps. What I have seen today was a true ghost ship. A horrible hulk beyond imagination. And my hubris! To think I might swat at them like a mosquito in the netting when they are more a crocodile in our swimming hole. What a fool I was! You are right, Nallu. I have done nothing but instill new animosity between our peoples. For all of this I must apologize.”

“To them?” Jange asked in a gasp of shock.

“Yes, to them. If they will accept it.”

The buzz of scandalized whispers grew, but Gallia knew she had not yet reached her most controversial words. She raised her hand to gesture for silence.

“Why did I not take the Aur child from Alai?” She waited for the room to quiet down before pushing on. “We all agreed here in this very room two days ago – even you Nallu – that it was not a danger to them. That it was safe for the time being so close, especially with Bemko’s watchful eye. We agreed it would be best to encourage Alai to return it of his own accord, quietly, as he had promised. We can only assume he was close to bringing me the Aur child. Did he wantonly grab it to begin some losting? That is a baseless speculation with which I do not agree. Of his character, none will argue there was any intention to harm any of us, least of all his own family. So, it must then be presumed that his departure was not of wild abandon or even a flight in fear of repercussions, but in absolute misery or worse, madness. The man has lost his family. Have pity for such a one! Moreover, is it not our duty to collect him before more misery comes to him than he has already witnessed?”

“Who will go for him?” someone yelled.

“I will, of course,” Gallia said.

Jange jumped up again. “You have nearly fourteen decades! You can’t endure it, Gallia.”

Gallia smiled and said, “To love each one is to give him all we might; if the man deviated from our teachings, it is we who may hope to help him in his present loss and return him to the fold. I shall not condemn him to anything. Is our village not made stronger by the bonds of love between us?”

There was just one more point Gallia wanted to make.

“Therefore, I recommend to the council that I join the crew of a fast ship,” she pointed out the window to the harbor, “on the Marlin perhaps, to traverse his last known course with the hope to return him and the Aur child back to his home, our flock, our village.”

Nallu had been fidgeting in her seat. She seemed to rise and fall several times as if her seat was slanted forward and she could not find the friction to stay put. “And while you’re gone,” she said, “or if, protect us all, you fail to return from this journey, what have you to say to us about that?”

“Ah,” Gallia replied. “The burning question on your mind is, to whom shall the elders turn in my absence, temporarily or otherwise?”

Nallu only pressed her lips tightly together.

Gallia continued. “To that, I say, we should follow protocol and ask the next-oldest among us to carry that weary burden, which would be yourself, Nallu-Hoenria, if you accept.”

There were murmurs in the room, but Gallia did not let these stop her. “That is, of course, unless you wish to defer on account of lack of experience?”

Nallu bolted upright, firmly planting one foot on the floor. “Do you suggest that I am not complete in my knowledge of Our Order?”

Gallia shook her head. “That is not at all what I suggest.” She swept her had around before her, covering the entire room. “We each are capable in that, and some, more than others, quite adept at thumping heavily upon the psalms of our scripture. I only suggest that you might be unfamiliar with the role of a situation in which you would be doing the first-guessing.”

Gallia heard her peers attempt to tamp down their chuckles. She returned to her seat and awaited a response. Inward leanings and whispers transformed quickly into nods of approval. The elders showed their appreciation with reserved smiles, the best that could be gathered on such a sad day.