At the end of the sea

I grew up in a place that you would never be able to find. In the place that I was born, maps do not show you what the world looks like. They show you what direction you must travel in to find it. I am told that the great sea-farers of your world drew their maps as we did – sea-shell islands and strings to mark the currents and sea-roads. The Polynesians – is that a word? Were they real?

In the world I grew up in, the sea was all. We are travellers for that reason – our world is ruled by the restless sea and sky, which breathe their change into our blood and bones. A very long time ago someone came to my island who thought the way that your people do about maps. He spent many, many years travelling between the scattered islands, and eventually came up with a vast sheet of canvas on which he had traced their forms and names. It is a marvel, preserved behind glass in the floor of the House of the World which was enlarged specially to house it. This traveller did the same with our sky, our winking stars and our twelve moons – the three major, and the seven minor, and the two that appear only at dawn and dusk. That great sheet of black canvas was stretched behind glass in the ceiling. The House of the World is a place of rumours. I entered it once, when I was considered mature enough and wise enough to understand what it was that I was seeing, and I was speechless at what I saw in that huge place.

Understand, that was the only time that I have ever seen a picture of what the world would look like, were I a star. That is the only time I have seen the islands set out neatly in their place, scattered gems painted in finely coloured inks in the vast white ocean of blank canvas. From this picture I knew the shape and form of my world. This is not a marvellous thing to you, I know, but to me it was more wonders than could be imagined, to know the form of Ithay without having set foot there. Everyone felt that way about the map that the traveller drew. At least, all of my people.

I think that I should explain my world to you, a little. Really it is three worlds in one. As I have perhaps mentioned, it is a world that is full of the sea. Everywhere you go, you can hear and smell and feel the nearness of the oceans. And our seas are not like yours. Our seas are to yours as an eagle is to a caged parakeet, deep and dancing patterns of interwoven currents and complex tides. They run through our people like bones, like blood, like breath. We are a tall people, measured against you, sleek like eels. Our hands and feet are large and webbed, our toes vestigial, our fingers thin and four-knuckled. Compared to you our ears and noses are tiny and close, our teeth sharp, our eyes large and bright. Unlike you we have no hair at all, and we have no gods either. We have never felt the need to blame our misfortunes upon an unstoppable, omnipotent being that cannot be brought to account. Have faith in yourself, that is how we believe.

The other people belong to the world of the sky, not the sea. As our seas are great, so are the winds. Our world has few great mountains to slow and tire the sky, and so the wind is always blowing. We have storms, many storms. A hurricane that would be counted a great disaster in your world, to us is very little. The children of the sky are very small. A tall one would come up to your waist. Their bodies are tiny slivers, unimaginably light. Their legs are very thin, connected by a membrane of skin which they use as a bird uses its tail, and their arms are disproportionately long, perhaps as long as I am tall. They, too, are connected to the tiny body by sheets of trembling pale skin, covered like the rest of them in pale sky-grey featherlike fur. Their eyes are small and their ears large. They treat the sky as we treat the sea – it is something to ride, swim through, delight in, live in. Watching them fly is like watching the pure soul of lightness, though our peoples have little enough to do with each other.

I find it interesting that wherever I go, every people is constructed to the same basic plan. It is as though at one point in the past unimaginable, we were all one.

The third world-in-one-world belongs to neither of our peoples, though it touches us both, and it is the world of the dusk. At twilight the wind dies, and does not live again until the last of the light has bled from the sky. At twilight, the sea darkens until the sky is black, and then it begins to sing its own song of light. Phosphorescence, you would call it. Until the wind picks up once more, and the sea begins to light its own way, the world is silent. In a still sky and a dark sea, nothing moves. And then the night falls, blanket soft, and both of our worlds exhale. We always fear that the twilight will not fade, that the wind will not rise, that the sea will not sing. At dawn, the world slips briefly back into stillness, but the suns always rise. Yes, we have two of them – that is why our world is much warmer than yours, I think. They orbit each other, tracing a slow circle through the sky, and we orbit them. That is another thing the traveller told us. He told us that not only is our world a collection of islands set in a great swathe of sea, but it is one of many worlds set in a great swathe of darkness emptier than anything. We are one island among uncountable numbers.

When I saw that great picture that the traveller made, safe behind glass beneath my bare feet – for I had left my shoes at the door – the first thing that swam into my head was, Is this everything there is? Every island that I had ever heard of was there, but I could not say that I had heard of everywhere. And although the map was a great circle, still it had edges, still it was bounded. I had always known that the sea was boundless. I walked to the edge of the map and asked the keeper of the House of the World what was beyond it.

She looked at me strangely. “I do not know,” she replied. “I do not think that it is a true place. You cannot find the end of the sea.”

I wished the traveller was still alive, so that I could have asked him. However he had died long ago, and been burned as all people here are, both the sea- and the sky-children. Hushed by the wonder of the great pictures that the traveller drew, his legacy behind glass in the House of the World, I did not question further. On the walls of the House were stretched dozens of maps, maps as I would recognise them; round disks of copper or bronze engraved with the name of the island they represent, connected by woven threads of bright colours. The colours in each thread, their combinations, tell as much to me as a pattern of contour lines would say to you. They tell me that to reach Aleth from my home in Irese I must find the current that goes in the direction that Fourth Moon rises from, unless it is winter, in which case a different approach is required. Looking back at the picture that the traveller made, I was surprised when I worked out that if you journeyed in the rising direction of Fourth Moon, you would miss Aleth entirely. I left that place of rumours full of questions.

The traveller had drawn an edge on the sea.

I could not get that simple fact out of my head. At twilight I watched the sea darken to ink, unruffled, utterly still as the wind was dead, reflecting the pale light of the sinking Second Moon and eerie crimson-blushed Third as it made its brief daily appearance. As far as I could see, the ocean was boundless – its smooth flatness broken only by a few long low cargo ships at anchor in the bay. By the time the sea had sung its light up out of the deeps, I knew that I could not rest on Irese any longer. The knowledge of the traveller and his picture and his assertion – the endless sea has an end! Boundless oceans are bounded! – would slowly drive me mad as long as it remained unanswered, working away at my mind like a tiny crack in the hull of an undersea-ship.

That night I dreamed of following the rising of Fifth Moon; and she did not rise to an apex, and then fall, as she did in the world of true night – she continued to rise and rise and rise, her dim cobalt radiance growing bright as I followed her further up into the sky, and the sea that rose to meet it until I could no longer distinguish the two in the white-blue apocalypse of the light of Fifth Moon.

It did not take me long to equip myself for a long journey. These are not uncommon among our people, and all of our children are given boats and taught to sail them almost before we can walk. We can swim since birth. I know you will not believe me, but it is true. Think of baby eels and you will see that to have a newborn swimming is not such an odd thing.

You might wonder why it is that we use ships, when we are so at home in the water. The truth is that we are people who are adapted to the sea; we are not fish. We cannot breathe water – we have lungs as you do – and we cannot swim forever against currents and tides. Sooner or later we will grow weak, and then we will drown. So we use ships. My family were fairly wealthy, as these things went; we have always been shipwrights, the best shipwrights in the area of Irese. At this time I was approaching my twenty-first birthday, which on our world means about the same as it does on yours, and my father and my sister and my brothers were making me a ship, which I named Ishamee.

You have seen my ship, I think, and you may believe that this is the ship that they made me. That is not entirely true. The heart of this ship was built on far-away Irese by my family, but as I have travelled through many lands and many worlds I have added to it myself. I am not such a bad shipwright that I am ashamed to tell you that much of Ishamee is my work. Particularly the engines – there was nothing wrong with the engines my oldest brother installed, but on my wanderings I came across places of the cleverest machines and engineers I have ever met, and they built me a set of engines that make Ishamee the fastest ship in any water. They have also adapted her armaments, so that when she cannot run she can at least fight – I am no soldier but the guns on Ishamee are truly vicious. The sails, similarly, are of the same plan as the original set – it is a fact that our people are the greatest sail-makers you will ever find – but constructed of a fabric that even now I cannot quite believe can be true. The rudder I have had to replace, once or twice, and you will see that it is not badly worked; also the masts. But the hull and keel and heart and soul of my Ishamee were built in the dry-docks on far-away Irese.

Ishamee is small enough to be easily handled by a single person, but she can carry eight at a stretch. With a good crew of three she practically sails herself. Her design is a slightly modified version of the type that was most popular in my world when I left it; the best design for a personal ship, or a ship for a small family. The modifications my family put in, at my request, make her a little tougher, a little stronger, able to hold a little more cargo – also a little slower when she was built, but the engines and sails that I have discovered along the way more than compensate for that. I have also had hydrofoils put in. On my world they would not work, our seas are too busy, but in some very placid worlds such as yours they make Ishamee fly.

The day following my twenty-first birthday, Ishamee was loaded with supplies for a long journey. My mother had spent several days in the House of the World, having obtained special permission from the keeper there, drawing me a small copy of the great picture-map that the traveller drew. This was encased behind glass in the cabin of my ship, above the cupboards that held the usual array of normal maps; it served me well over the years, to remind me of what it is that I seek. And protected as it is, even when Ishamee suffered her worst abuses, the inks have remained dry and as bright as the day my mother painted them.

There was little ceremony at my setting forth. It was early in the day, when the wind was just beginning to rise once more after the dawn stillness. My family and friends were gathered at the docks to wish me well goodbye; notably absent, however, was the one whom I might have loved, had I remained in his world. But I gave that up; I have given up love, in favour of discovery. I will not tell you his name. Among our people it is dangerous to name the dead; and I have been away so long, I must count all those I once knew as dead. Our goodbyes did not last long. Before the circling suns were high, Irese was a dot behind me; I have not seen it again.

My plan was to follow the long, drawn-out skeins of islands as close to the edge of the picture-map as I could, and then to go on blindly from there – into the places that no maps could show. The picture that the traveller drew was valuable in this; it showed me which islands to visit in turn, even though I used real maps to guide me between them. At every pause I replenished my supplies and had my Ishamee checked thoroughly. She was well-made, though, and suffered very little wear.

That early part of my journey to the end of the sea was possibly the happiest time that I have ever spent. Much of the time I carried passengers, two or three who wished to visit another place, who paid their way with money and company. Our people are great lovers of stories, and everywhere I went I found many new tales. I weathered a few storms that would be noteworthy even for us, outran six pirate-ships and outfought two more, and collected several stories of my own. Twice I paused to dive to a new wreck in shallow water, discovering many bright treasures that I hid away in the deepest parts of the hold. It is illegal to sell salvage on my world, as I imagine it is on yours; but I was not caught, and I waited until I was far, far away to sell any of the things that I found.

It was well over a year before I passed the very last of the islands, and this one was not marked on any maps; not even the picture that the traveller made. The inhabitants were strange, primitive, backwards people; but they were recognisably mine, still part of my world. They looked upon my Ishamee as something wondrous, extraordinary, far too grand and glorious to be a thing made by real people. I assured them that in the more populated areas in our great ocean, such ships were commonplace; and as it transpired, I had to spend little more than stories in re-supplying myself. When I left I did not know that it was the very last scrap of land that I would encounter, but after a few days I began to suspect, and to go more easily on my supplies. I ate mainly fish, which I dived for from the deck of Ishamee; when I had been out of sight of any land for almost a month, the fish grew larger and odder and more and more elusive, and the sea grew darker and colder, as if I were sailing into the ocean’s depths. There were no birds. The wind grew even stronger. The only noises, apart from those that I made, were the sounds that the high waves made slapping against the sides of my ship; I began to fear that in this empty wilderness of sea and sky I might lose myself entirely. Lose my mind, I mean – you understand what I mean by this? I was never in danger of losing my position, for the suns and moons still shone in their correct places; although the suns grew dimmer and the moons, brighter, until day was night and night was day. At that point, the very last of the sea-life disappeared. I was sailing through empty seas into the blinding light of Fifth Moon; and my Ishamee was sinking. She was not leaking; the very seas that held her up were pulling away from her hull. Spray on my face told me that the water was almost fresh here – then I understood why it did not hold my ship up, and I was afraid that it would carry on losing its saltiness until it lacked the strength to buoy her up at all, but it stabilised a few hours after I sailed into the empty seas.

That day-night, Fifth Moon did not rise to an apex and then sink, as she had in the world of true night that I had left behind me. I continued to follow her, sailing up into the sky through empty, heavy seas that rose to meet it; and I could not longer distinguish the two, in the blue-white apocalypse of Fifth Moon’s light.

And then, just as suddenly as the end of the world – the light winked out, and it was night once more, and Ishamee was sailing serenely through a world of empty dark seas and perfectly still sky. The seas did not sing with radiance as they did at home, and that was how I knew that I was in a different world than the one in which I had been born. But I had still not reached the end of the sea; I could see open water stretching out around me in all directions. Looking up I received a mighty shock. The sky was as empty as the sea. Here, there was nothing. No stars, no moons, no suns. Nothing at all but a void-sea and void-sky.

Shaken, frightened, I lowered the useless sails of Ishamee and set her engines to take me forwards. The compass-needle swung aimlessly around in its glass case, hammering home the point that this was a new place. Perhaps this was no place at all. After all this time wandering the worlds I still do not know whether this outside-world is a true place that a person can be, or not. All I know is that it lies between the borders of worlds.

Frightening as it is, this void is only a little space. A bare few hours passed before the sky began to lighten once more, but no suns were visible. I soon discovered that this was because I had sailed into a profound fog. Fog is not unknown on my world but it is not common, and it is never this thick. I could see no further in any direction than the length of my ship, but the wind lived again, and that was comforting. I turned off the engines, raised one small sail, and proceeded slowly through the disturbing, clinging damp whiteness. After a while I noticed that the compass had recovered itself. Devoid of maps to know the sea, I could only rely on it to keep me from sailing in circles; but I knew that I was back in a real place, and the knowledge that it was another world was enough to make me sing with excitement.

After a time, Ishamee’s keel began to scrape and shiver against sand. I sank her anchors, hoping that this was low tide, and sat on deck with my so-shin over my knees, waiting out the fog. A so-shin – perhaps I should have explained this before. A so-shin is an excellent weapon, a little like a spear from the place in your world called Nippon. That is a real place, yes? Good. A so-shin is a little like one of those spears – it has a shaft that is nearly as tall as I am, a long blade sharpened at both sides so that it can be used both as a spear, and as a sword. The butt of a so-shin is, however, fitted with a second blade – in design much like the first, but perhaps half as long. These are common weapons on my world; although we do have guns a little like yours, on long journeys it is easy to run out of ammunition. It was not the only weapon I had with me, but I did not wish to appear aggressive by arming myself heavily.

I was very tired, and I must have dozed off; for when I came suddenly back to wakefulness, the fog had burned thin in the distant fire of a single, small sun. Ishamee was anchored in the middle of a vast circular bay, shallow here, the water almost transparent. I could see little fish and bigger eels playing around my ship’s anchor-chains. Around me, in a tight circle – but keeping a wary distance – were many little boats. Unlike most ships in my world they were fashioned from wood, and they rode very low in the water. Only four people were on each one. The boats were open, with one sail apiece, and four large oars. No engines, no guns. I could see at a glance that these boats could never travel as far as even the smallest and lightest ship from my home. And these people – they were almost as tall as I was myself, as light and airy as the children of the sky. They were dressed alike in long white robes, that flowed together with their long white hair. To my eyes their white skin, pale-blue eyes and long, smooth faces looked odd, ugly even; but I am sure that I looked as odd to them.

I stood up, holding my so-shin upright in an attempt to indicate peaceful intent; but that was hardly necessary as on seeing me waken, one of the men in one of the boats raised his hands and shouted something in a strange, otherworldly language. To me it sounded no more like speech than the empty tapping of a rope against the mast of my ship; but after months of hearing no sounds but those I made, it was not unwelcome. The words… I cannot adequately explain exactly what happened then. I can only call it magic, a spell, and hope that these words mean to you what I mean by them. You see in my world, magic sees as little use as it does in yours; this was the first time I had seen it employed. The words rose through the damp, cool air and wrapped around me so tightly that I could not move a muscle. I felt bound in invisible tapes, as though the very air had turned to stone around me. Only then did the boats approach, and the first one on board my ship was a blind woman who walked with the air of the spell-wright. It was not clear to me which of them was the more important. But from the way the others behaved towards the two, I guessed that they were of great rank in this world.

The spell-wright spoke again, in his bizarre feathery voice; and this time, greater wonders unfolded. Before my eyes, little white letters formed in the air. They spelled out words in my language, but I was for a few minutes too taken aback to read them in any sensible order. But the strange people were patient, and clearly meant me no malice; and so I read.

Forgive my binding-spell, strange one; but we were afraid when we saw your outlandish ship and your weapon. This spell is such that when you speak we will read your words in our tongue, and so we can speak to each other.

These words faded and he said some more, which formed themselves up in neat ordered columns for my wondering eyes to run down.

I have released your tongue. Swear that you will not attempt harm and I will release the rest of you. I promise you that if you come meaning hurt to us, it will go badly with you.

My own voice sounded strange to me, after so long. I can only imagine what our language, full of the sigh and whisper and might of the sea, sounded like to these gentle airy people. “I swear by everything I have in the world that I will do no harm.” My words formed into bizarre shapes in the air, which the assembled people read with interest.

Feeling the air exhale, and release me, I knelt slowly down and laid my so-shin flat on the deck of Ishamee. The spell-wright smiled as I did so, and the blind woman clinging to his arm let out a sigh that sounded like relief.

This is good, strange one. Tell us what your name is.

“Konee,” I replied.

They told me their names, which I will not repeat for the chance is good that they, too, are dead. Come with us back to our shore-house and we will speak further. You may ride in a boat, or if you would prefer, you may swim; we will see to it that your ship is guarded well, but we will touch nothing that is yours.

Noticing the rows of needle-like daggers worn by the guards, I did not argue. Electing to swim, I slid gleefully through the cool, shallow water beside the boat that the leaders travelled in until it docked at a jetty built from the wooden wall of a little hut. As the blind woman was helped out into the shore-house, I pulled myself out of the water with some regret; the water here was very fresh, odd-feeling to someone used to swimming in salty oceans, but certainly not unpleasant to swim in. I glanced over at Ishamee, and found that they were as good as their word and had left men behind to guard her.

The shore-house was a large structure, built mostly on the steep, rocky beach but jutting out into the bay. It was fashioned from pale wood, elegantly carved; rather than walls there were low, loose screens of the same material, leaving generous views of the ocean and the forest inland. I sat where I was indicated to, at the very top of a long oval table, facing inland; and I must admit that I could barely take my eyes from the sight. Partly the sight of land was strange after so long at sea – a little part of me insisted that if I looked away it would break up and drift away. Partly it was because there are no such forests in my world. Our trees are little, stunted, scrawny things; bent and eroded from the constant passage of the powerful wind. Here they were immense and elegant and seemed bigger than anything in any world had any right to be – but behind them, just visible through the thin film of mist that clung to the world, rose mountains that I simply could not believe. I understood that waves could sometimes be that size, in the heart of the most powerful storms that tore through the emptiest parts of the ocean - but for rocks to pile themselves up like that was simply incredible.

The leaders seated themselves at the opposite end of the oval, and the guards spread out between us. Tall clouded-crystal cylinders, which at length I understood to be drinking-vessels, appeared from somewhere or another – I was too preoccupied with soaking up the sight of the forested mountains to notice.

We feel that you came from another place, the blind woman began, her words thin silver letters. We felt something press through the Veil, and then you appeared here; the strangest sight that any of our people have ever seen, the strangest mind that I have ever felt. Where did you come from? What do you seek?

“I came from an island Irese, in a world of the ocean; I seek the end of the sea. But my ship is a little damaged and I am running out of supplies – grant me a few days to repair my Ishamee and I will not trouble you further.”

‘Ishamee’ is your ship? I nodded. We will gladly furnish you with whatever you may need, for to find the end of the endless seems a worthy endeavour. We will also, if you wish, give you the speaker-charm – our people have some small experience of world-wandering and we know that it is invaluable.

“The speaker-charm – that is the spell that makes our words form themselves in the air?”

Yes. If you wish, we can also teach you what little knowledge we have of the worlds.

“Anything you can grant this seeker would be gratefully accepted.”

The worlds, then. Konee may perhaps imagine that it is pure luck that she came to this world first, a world where she finds that which will be of great help in the future; but we know that this is not so. The Veil between all of the places that there are responds to the desires of the traveller – do you understand this? When you enter the Veil, you do not direct your passage. It will direct you to where you need to go, or where you wish to go, whether you recognise your wishes or not. So you understand that when you entered the Veil for the first time, you were wishing for help; and so you came to a place where what little help there is for world-wanderers can be found.

“Do you see many world-wanderers here?”

One or two in a lifetime.

I nodded. “This seeker is grateful for your help.”

The meeting dissolved after that; one of the guards showed me to their rudimentary dry-dock. In my world, ships are positioned over moveable frames at one of our many high tides; and when the tide goes out they are strapped in place and the frames rolled up to the dock. Here, there were apparently no tides at all – and their boats were so small that a few strong men could lift one. Ishamee presented more of a problem but we eventually managed to prop her upright on a fairly smooth stretch of pebble beach, from where I went to work. This world had lamentably few tools that I was accustomed to using but Ishamee had suffered very little damage – nothing that I could not fix with the materials to hand.

I spent six days in that place, partly fixing and re-supplying Ishamee and partly exploring. I swam up the river towards the mountains, climbing waterfalls that were new things to me – if you have never climbed a rock-face before, it is a strange experience to flail for handholds on slippery, sharp spines of cold rock while water cascades down onto your head. Once I had climbed the first one alone, I was shown the ancient staircases cut into the rock of each cliff. So I followed the river upwards for three days until I reached a high, high cold lake; as clear as glass, filled with bright red eels as long as my arm, and tiny luminous green fish that swarmed at night, filling the lake with living phosphorescence until it almost looked like the sea of my home. I never found the city of the strange people, although they told me about it; to reach it, I was told, one must fly.

I asked about the maps of this world, and was informed that these people did not make representations of their lands. Instead they dream their way around the world. At first this made no sense to me, but they explained that dream-craft was as well known to them as ship-building was to my people; all the knowledge of the world, they say, can be reached through a good dream.

On the seventh day, I said many thanks and goodbyes to the people of this strange place and pointed Ishamee towards the still, unblotted horizon. The speaker-charm still stung and itched where it had been set into the skin of my throat, making speech a little painful, but if my previous voyage was a guide to future ones I would not need my voice for a long time. And it was so; nearly four months later I felt Ishamee rise high on dense, salty seas, smelled the sick stench of poisoned water, and found myself in a new world.

This world was a place of machines and of industry, and the sea and the sky were filthy. The people here were unaccustomed to world-wanderers, and were not exactly thrilled to see me; but Ishamee was faster than their ships, and I escaped to a dirty, mean little place that was a haunt of smugglers and pirates and others who did not mind my bizarre and inexplicable appearance. This was the place of engineers, squat, dirty, grey-black people. I soon discovered that the vast complexes of enormous machines that I had seen when first arriving were merely the dirty outer shells around intricate assemblages of sterile blue rooms where tiny, tiny electronic and mechanical beings lived their complicated metal lives. Almost every single person here, it seemed, was in love with twisted and shaped metal, and the things it could be made to do. Within three days Ishamee had new, glorious engines, and they were happily taking apart her old ones. I left that place soon after, having been almost permanently sick since I first sailed into their poisoned seas.

The next world was more like my home-world – a wet and windy place, but much colder than I was used to. The next after that, a place of mountainous clouds and vicious wild-fires and enormous grasslands as wide as most seas. The one after that, a bizarre world with very short days and very long nights; and after that a world with no day or night at all, merely endless blue twilight and bare rock and furtive little people with enormous, bat-like eyes. Everywhere I went, no matter how strange it seemed, I discovered that things seemed to have been constructed by the same builder; all things, it seemed, were put together from the same materials. And so after countless years and many, many worlds – I came to this place, your world, and this country – what is it called? South Africa? Yes, South Africa – I came here.

So that is a true account of my wanderings so far. I am aware that you are not used to world-wanderers here, or the speaker-charm that still functions perfectly after perhaps hundreds of years, or ships that look like my Ishamee – but I promise you that if you do as I have done, if you follow your single lonely Moon into the sky, you will come to the Veil and push through it and find yourself in a world of strange, white, airy people, who will speak to you in silver words that sound like feathers. Sail further and perhaps you will find your way to my world, and worlds that I have yet to visit. Further, and further yet, you sail – until you become like the traveller was, like I am, a restless wanderer chasing the receding horizon, forever seeking to find what lies at the end of the sea.