Five Notes Stepping Down

The far bright line had stopped going away.

It lay still a breath, then a little closer.

I didn't need Grandma there to tell me the sea had turned.

I'll call her Hana now.

I didn't have her name yet, but I was about to have her song.

She hoisted the smallest of the four onto her hip and pointed at the next egg.

The third egg lay at a slant, its hull cool enough now to touch.

Hana scraped the striped panel clear, took my wrists, and set both my palms flat on it.

She pressed down on my hands with hers and turned them hard, like wringing out a net.

The blister on my right palm tore, and the top rose on its seam.

Press with both hands, then twist.

I could do that.

Three children were inside, the smallest screaming until it ran out of breath.

Hana knelt at the rim and hummed.

It wasn't much of a song: five notes stepping down, one back up, and a long low note to rest on.

Where you come from, I'm told, it takes a few times through to learn a song.

It took me once.

The second time she began it, I sang it with her, gills shut, like singing with a hand over my mouth.

She stopped and stared at me across the hatch.

Then she started again, and we sang it together, and the screaming child hiccuped and listened.

It was the first thing we'd shared that wasn't a drawing in the sand.

A line of lanterns was coming down from the cliffs, with Grandma's staff at the front.

Behind her came the mothers of the Long Shore.

They had watched five strange children carried up the beach, crying the way our own babies cry before their gills open.

None of them could hear that and stay on a cliff.

At the first egg, Grandma turned and told them what she had learned with that short, thick thing in her face: sing with your gills shut.

Elder Imbri watched from the dunes and came down neither to help us nor to stop us.

One of the mothers pushed her own lantern into Hana's free hand.

I showed the rest what Hana had shown me, and after that we stopped going one egg at a time.

Lanterns spread across the flat in threes: one to dig, one to press and twist, one to kneel at the rim and sing Hana's song.

Every mother on the shore had it after hearing me sing it once.

Hana ran from hatch to hatch as each one opened, and no child left a rim until she had looked into its face.

Children came up crying out of the dark and went shoreward on Seren backs, their small hot hands locked around our necks.

While we were digging out the fifth egg, the sea reached the foot of the Last Stone, far out among the graves.

I looked past it, toward the twelfth fire and my mother's stone.

The channels out there were already shining full, and nobody could swim a child back through them with its head above the water.

The eggs under our hands, we could still carry home dry.

I bent back down to the sand.

By the time the seventh egg came open, lanterns were kneeling at the last four.

Six mothers had dug it out ahead of us and knelt in a ring around the rising hatch, singing.

A child inside was wailing, and their gills flared open on their own, the way ours always do for a crying baby, before any of them remembered.

The first face out was a freckled boy's, his hair shaved close.

His name was Dez, I learned later, and he was twelve, the oldest in there.

He looked out at a ring of open mouths, small sharp teeth all the way around him.

Then he raised the same short, thick thing Hana had pointed at Grandma, in both shaking hands.

Grandma saw his face before I did.

"Gills!" she shouted, and stepped in front of the mothers.

That was how I learned what the thing did.

Red fire cracked out of it, struck her right arm, and set her shawl burning before it dropped hissing to the sand.

I packed wet sand on with both hands until nothing burned but the flare.

Under the shawl, her arm had gone a color I didn't want to look at.

She wasn't looking at it either, only at the boy.

Hana reached him in three steps, pulled the empty gun from his hands, and threw it as far as she could into the dark.

Then she held his head against her shoulder while he shook.

The flare lay on the sand and lit the flat red all the way to the cliffs.

Elder Imbri came down then, fast, his cloak black with water to the waist.

He looked at Grandma's arm, then at the boy.

"They carry fire in their hands."

"He's a child, Imbri," Grandma said.

"So was I."

He told the mothers, "Everyone in, now, with whatever you're carrying."

He meant the children, and he didn't make anyone set one down.

"The channels behind the Second Stone are already full. I came through one to my waist."

The Second Stone was still dry.

The sea had come up the channels first, the way Grandma taught me, only faster.

The mothers lifted the children high onto their shoulders and started in.

We got Grandma as far as the Second Stone, where her legs folded and she sat down hard against it.

Elder Imbri stood over us with his light.

Hana went down the mothers' line anyway, touching every head, holding the card up to every face.

Eleven eggs open, fifty-five children, and she had looked into every one of their faces as they came out.

No Junie.

She turned to me with the card and said nothing.

I pointed past the open eggs to the grave beds by the Last Stone, where the twelfth fire had come down.

The place I'd been walking toward all night.

Grandma's breath caught, and I knelt beside her and set my lantern down where she could see it.

When I looked up, Hana was already running, the mother's lantern swinging from her fist, out into the dark alone.

The glowing edge of the sea slid across the sand to within a hand of the stone at our backs.

The Tide-Keeper worked the bronze bell off its cord with her left hand.

Grandma held out the bell. Far out, Hana's light kept going.