An Epistrophe of Ships - Chapter One

[Shyriath]

Chapter One: Approach

Hinda Farsight awoke to the sound of shouting.

For a moment she panicked. It was very late at night (or rather, very early in the morning) and only the tiny Fourth Watch was on duty; Second was sleeping, and Third was usually winding down it's after-duty activities by now. Shouting at night was an indicator of danger, or else of an impending brawl. But these shouts were not ones of panic or anger...

Hinda rubbed her eyes, and looked at the clock; it was not quite four, but having been born into a First Watch family, it meant that it was nearly time for her to wake up anyway. The fifteen-year-old quickly donned some light working clothes and ran up onto the deck.

Not even the faintest stirrings of sunlight brightened the starry sky, but the deck was brightly lit by the running-lights. Aside from the pilot and navigator on the bridge and a few others with vital duties, the Fourth Watch of the Osprey Striking, along with awakened members of the other three Shifts, lined the rails, staring and yelling cheerfully into the darkness. To starboard and to port, there were the running-lights of other ships, and their crews were shouting back.

"Hinda!" The voice of her younger brother Onar rang out over the others. "Over here!"

Hinda ran over to the railing. She was of an age where having a younger brother was an embarrassment at best, but under the circumstances she was willing to tolerate him. "Who are they?"

"All of the People! Someone said it was Delfine over on port, but this one's Nukapai's Bite--"

He was cut off by a shriek of joy. "Hai! Ahoy, Nukapai's Bite!" Hinda bellowed at the top of her lungs. "Hai! Atuna Windscent! Are you there, Atuna?"

A reply could be barely heard above the din. "Farsight! You haven't fallen out of your crow's nest yet?"

Hinda laughed. Osprey Striking had joined a convoy nine years previously, and Nukapai's Bite was among the other ships of the People that had been participating. They had sailed together for a number of years before parting ways, and Atuna, only a year older than Hinda, had been a natural playmate. Although they had seen each other only rarely since then, they had kept in touch through the port-post.

"Not before you fall out of yours!" Hinda replied. "Going to Assembly?"

"Where else? I'll see you there in a few hours!"

"Hours?? We're that close?"

"Where d'you think all these ships are headed?" Atuna's voice dwindled as the faster ship pulled ahead of Osprey Striking. Hinda shielded her eyes from the harsh running-lights, and indeed, in the darkness all around them were the lights of other ships; at least a dozen, maybe a score within sight, and doubtless many more over the horizon. Assemblies were held yearly, but the Grand Assemblies were rarer and far more important, and for these the People were expected to gather in full, every ship sailing every part of the world, unless doing do would imperil their lives.

"How far out are we?" Hinda wondered aloud. She was mildly annoyed to hear her brother reply, "Dad says we should see it right about dawn."

"It'll be magnificent," Hinda murmured. "The first Grand Assembly since we were born, and we'll be there and see it all. All the ships! The people! And I can meet up with Atuna and see the sights..."

"And Atuna's brother," noted Onar, who had seen the amount of attention his sister had aimed in that direction last time they'd met up with Nukapai's Bite. "Though to be fair, he'll probably see you right back- OW!"

Hinda absentmindedly moved her foot from on top of her brother's. "I'm sorry," she said sweetly, "my foot must've slipped. What were you saying?"

"Nothing," muttered Onar.

After breakfast, Hinda retrieved her binoculars, her jacket, and her broad-brimmed hat, and went to the mast to take up her accustomed place in the crow's nest, even though First Watch had not formally begun. Saru Longstride of Fourth Watch generally welcomed the company, since lookout duty at night tended to be fairly boring; and anyway, her father was busy getting into his formal sea coat for arrival, her mother was helping the quartermaster determine what supplies would be needed, and if she waited till seven to climb up she'd miss the approach.

"Morning," Saru drawled, as she hauled herself into the nest. He was a man in his forties, thin and long-legged, though bundled up as he was this morning one would never know it. At these latitudes it was well into autumn, and the nights were chilly. "Come for a good seat, I suppose? Father Sun should be shining some light over the horizon soon."

"I hope so, I'm getting tired of waiting." Hinda handed over a mug with a tight-fitting lid. "I brought some hot tea."

"Ah, you're a savior, girl." Saru removed the lid and sipped cautiously.

"Where're those fancy binoculars of yours?"

He made a face. "Drossed again, I'm afraid. I'll have to grab someone from the Patchworks mission and get them to work on it."

Hinda smiled. "The quartermaster will gripe again, you know."

"Well, it's my share of the take that's paying for it, so he can keep on griping."

She struggled not to laugh. Advanced technology, especially the kind that couldn't be easily jury-rigged at sea or repaired with off-the-shelf parts, tended to be frowned upon by most of the People; things liable to mysteriously fail mid-voyage couldn't be trusted, unless they were so useful as to be worth the risk. Saru's oddity was that he insisted on using newfangled night-vision binoculars for his lookout duties, and despite their usefulness, they stopped functioning properly with distressing frequency.

Hinda put on her jacket to help ward off the cold, and watched the horizon to the aft of the ship. Already, the night sky there was being infused with a deep, dark blue.

"What is it like, the Grand Assembly?" she asked. "You have been before, haven't you?"

"Twice," he replied, "But old as I may seem to you, I was just a boy for the first one. When an event happens only once every nineteen years, no one's going to have all that much experience with it. But it's pretty interesting, more so than the yearly Assemblies. All the other ships will be there, there'll be hundreds of landwalkers there, plenty of things to see and do and plenty of people to talk to. A big festival, almost, to keep everyone else busy while the ships' councils deal with the boring things."

"I don't think I've been to even a regular Assembly," murmured Hinda, sighing.

"No? ...But then, that's likely so. Your dad never did like them, and we've spent a long time in the Raynor Sea. But you didn't miss much with those; just ships exchanging news and gossip all at once, and doing the tedious administrative things. This will be different."

They stared at the eastern horizon, the sky steadily brightening.

Hinda said at last, "We did spend so long in the east. All those strange places... like the place-of-sand, with all the ruins, and those camel-things."

Saru shrugged. "They say there was a great empire there once. Babkha. They brought the camels. The stories run," he added darkly, "that they were even more fond of them than the current natives."

"What do you mean?"

He hesitated. "It doesn't matter. ...Anyway, it's just land. There's the land here, and the land there; the one is strange in one way, the other strange in a different way, but it's all strange, all land. And as long as the strangeness includes new things to buy and sell, what else matters?"

"It just seems... well, there must be more to see on land."

"Inland merchandise always makes it way to the ports eventually, you know."

Hinda shook her head. "I know you know that's not what I mean."

"Oh, I suppose so. Around a certain age, people always become dissatisfied with the sea; it was the same with me, and you're more restless a soul than I was. I'm surprised it hadn't come up earlier. But you've been taught the histories and the Oath. Our place is the sea, and no one of the People-"

"Can live on land for more than a month without being put to death, yes." Hinda's voice took on a sarcastic, singsong quality. "And yes, I know that the pact was made to save our people from extermination, and yes, I know it's our oldest law. But no one wants to exterminate us anymore, so what's the point?"

Saru simply shrugged.

"And anyway," the girl continued, "There have been exceptions, dispensations."

"Yes," Saru replied with a smile, "I expect that in between history lessons you father pounded that into your head, too, his ancestry being what it is."

She calmed down, and smiled briefly. "That he did."

The older man stretched and yawned, and said, "It's never going to be easy on a young person, a situation like this. You have endless horizons, but they always look the same. The new sights are always on land, and you only ever see them for as long as you're in port. But think of it this way: how many landwalkers see so many places, however briefly?" He grinned, pointed, and added, "And how many landwalkers get to see a sight like this?"

Hinda jumped up, shielding her eyes from the sun as it peeked over the horizon, and grinned. All around them were ships: ships in the near distance, and ships to the horizon, and ships to fore and aft and starboard and port; ships of every kind and description, each flying its banner in the salty breeze. Each and every one was sailing west, and ahead of them all...

...ahead of them all, its smooth white surfaces gleaming in the dawn, the Callamen's Eye rose from the sea. Their center, their sanct, the one and only city of a People whose villages were their ships; and it lifted Hinda's heart to see it.

The sound of the sanct's foghorns boomed across the water, calling out greetings to the ships that rode the dawn toward it, and each and every ship bellowed its answer, the horns filling the air with a deep, vibrant tone. As Hinda clapped her hands over her ears, she made out the squeaking of the pulley over their heads, and saw the ship's banner lowered past the crow's nest. All around them, the other vessels lowered their own colors, and began raising another flag in their place, the same one on every ship.

She uncovered her ears and watched the same flag ascend to the top of their own mast: a field of two colors, white on top and sea-blue below, a wide black vertical stripe in the middle, and upon the stripe a white spiralling shape, the Silver Tear.

Hinda glanced at Saru, and was surprised to see the usually insouciant man blinking back tears. Catching her gaze, he grinned. "There are things even I find moving, you know. Mark what you're seeing, girl; we're all of us together here. We may not be so impressive ship by ship, we may fight and swindle and grumble at each other, no nation may tremble in fear of us... but here and now and forever, this is us together. We are Pennà, the People, and we always will be."

Hinda nodded silently, her gaze returning to the sanct. Although she had been told the same thing since she was small, perhaps she had not fully understood... but here, and now, and probably forever, she saw it at last.