A Lantern For The Deep Bed

Every nineteen years, the sea on Vael, a world on the far side of the galaxy from yours, walks away from the shore, and my whole people walk out after it, singing.

I was sixteen, and I was carrying a lantern to my mother's grave, out where the current never lets anyone swim, on the one night in nineteen years you can walk there.

The pull took her when I was four, and I had never seen her stone.

We left the net-rafts pulled up on the high beach and walked out singing, gills flared, mouths wide.

Under water, our songs carry farther than any shout.

All the way, Grandma Ossa made me say the tide back to her: the sea turns when the small moon sets.

It floods until first light, then rests as long as it takes to sing the long song.

Far ahead stood the Last Stone. I knew it from songs: nine steps up its side, a line cut below the top for the highest tide anyone remembers.

Halfway there, the clouds tore open, and seven warships, bigger in the sky than our moons, slid out over my people.

The singing stopped all at once.

Every open mouth shut, every flared gill stood stiff.

Under the ships, the bare seabed ran two miles out to the glowing line of the sea, like a road you could walk to the moons.

They were dark as spearheads, and their lights blinked all together, like one slow heart.

Then fire came out of their bellies.

Twelve streaks of it, diving at the beach.

Elder Imbri screamed first.

"Sky-fire! Everyone off the sand!"

He was eight the year fire fell into our bay and boiled it, and nobody argued with him.

Mothers snatched up their little ones, the ones under seven, whose gills hadn't opened yet.

The whole Long Shore ran for the cliffs.

I stayed beside Grandma Ossa, because the Tide-Keeper doesn't run, and I was her apprentice.

So I watched the fires come.

They slowed before they hit, the way a seabird brakes before it touches the water.

Not one of them fell on a lantern.

They came down on the empty sand past the Second Stone, and the ground jumped under my feet.

One fell far out, by the Last Stone, where the dead are laid.

Where my mother was.

Grandma looked up at the small moon, already low over the edge of the sea.

"Two hours," she said. "Then the sea comes back for all of it."

Every child on the Long Shore knows the rule.

When the water touches the Second Stone, the Tide-Keeper strikes her bell three times, and after the bell, nobody goes out.

Not for anything.

The nearest fire had come down a hundred steps from us.

It lay half-buried in the violet sand, smoking, shaped like an egg and as long as a fishing raft.

A round window on top was fogged white.

"Selu," Grandma said. "Close your gills, so whatever's in there knows you won't bite."

I closed them and walked to it with my lantern up.

The glass was hot enough to feel from a hand away.

Then something inside pressed against the glass. A hand. A small one. Five fingers, and nothing at all between them.