SSCS 02: Installment 19 of 32
How to Catch Flying Pigs, and Sea Monsters
This is Installment 19 of this year’s SSCS. If you want to start at the beginning of ‘How to Catch Flying Pigs, and Sea Monsters’, go here! If you want to know what the heck an SSCS is, go here!
Previously…
This time, though, when gran-Tom reached out her tentacles, they wrapped around Mina’s wrist, hard and cold, and the warped voice that hissed from her shell-thin lips made a shudder of dread crawl over Mina’s flesh. “Why are you late, Mina-precious, Mina-the-contrary-and-naughty-one?”
…How to Catch Flying Pigs, and Sea Monsters
Installment 19: 20.1226
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When Mina was little, she’d lived in a little town on dry land, just like most normal land people. The town was close to the ocean, and traded with a lot of other land people, and with sea people, too, and Mina had a couple of friends who were sea children who she would play with when their fathers and mothers got together for working. Working often meant trading, and loading and unloading the things they were trading, but sometimes it meant planning or building or repairing things that would be a help to everybody, like the long docks that stretched all around and into the harbor, or the chain elevators that connected the low-tide caves to the bluff where most of Mina’s town had been built. When the grown-ups were working, the children were usually all let loose in one of the warehouses, all in a jumble, to run around and play where only a couple of bigger kids could look after the lot, and the kids who were sea people liked to run around just as much as the land-people kids did.
Mina’s father and mother were hard workers, and on a working day like that sometimes they’d be gone a long time, and Mina would eventually fall asleep in a heap with some of the other kids and wake up when it was dark and her father was gathering her up in his arms to take her home. But on every day, her father always carried her home or to her bed, and while they went her parents both sang the songs of their town and the songs of the two towns they’d each come from before this one, and they let Mina sing with them, so that their voices wove in and out of each other’s in a way that sounded like a hug, even after they’d gone and closed the door of her snug little room for sleeping.
Most days weren’t all-together working days like that, and there were different things they’d do on the other days. Her mother had a workshop – a lot smaller than the warehouses – where she’d be most of the time to build things or fix things for people. Sometimes she’d let Mina help with some of the very small things because she said little fingers could work wonders. And Mina’s father was one of their town’s best cooks. Sometimes he would take Mina down to the sea to dig for clams, or out into the pastures along the bluffs to hunt for rabbits and wild roots and herbs – even one or two flowers he’d taught Mina could be good to eat. When he cooked, he always made more food than their little family needed, and traded away the rest to their neighbors for money or other things. Most days when Mina was little, she spent a lot of her day chopping roots and stirring soup, sometimes with a wildflower tucked behind her ear.
But the last day had been an all-together working day, and she’d spent it running around with her friends in one of the biggest warehouses. They played a lot of drumming-singing games that day, because it was raining outside, and the rain and wind together made everything loud, like there were waves crashing against the warehouse roof. When Mina woke up later that night, she was humming one of those drumming songs, and she expected to hear her father start humming it with her, with her mother’s voice joining in with light pat-pat notes right at the last second.
But there was just her own humming, and it was the wailing of the wind on the warehouse roof that had woken her up. And that was when everything had crashed together, and the world had become so loud Mina thought she’d never hear anything ever again. And at some point the loud was screaming, because everyone was cold and completely wet and the roof was completely gone from the warehouse altogether.
That night half the town had been swept away, by a wave so big it had towered up higher than the bluff. That night Mina’s parents had been swept away too, along with most of the parents who were really hard workers and had been staying out late to finish whatever it was they had started.
Three days later, Mina had been put on a boat with a sea man she had never met before, and they had driven straight toward the ocean horizon for a night and a day and a night and a day again until they had come at last to gran-Tom’s spire. “You’re needed,” was all he would say when Mina begged what was happening. “The sea’s been let to get too angry, and you’re needed to help calm her.” But then he’d stop after that, and Mina would imagine that the sea had a great mouth somewhere out past the distant horizon, and that keeping the sea calm meant feeding her little children. And so coming to ‘land’ on the spire had been a great relief, but going to meet gran-Tom for the first time – to be presented to her – Mina had still been terrified. Until she’d heard the old priestess singing, some of the same songs Mina’s father had sung sometimes. And when the old sea-woman had turned around she’d been holding a cup of tea from which drifted the scent of wild roses.
Once, when Mina was still little, gathering the roses for holy tea had reminded her of her father and mother, of working with them, and singing together with them. But that was many years ago now, and the work and the routine of the spire had ground away most of those memories, until they were like looking at a faded picture of something you knew about only because the picture was there to remind you.
And she still didn’t know how to calm the sea. She just fetched when gran-Tom said to fetch, and swept and cooked and cleaned up after the pigs likewise, so that the priestess could continue the work of the spires, which was really what they all depended on. All the long line of the spires, and all the priestesses in them singing their songs. Mina didn’t know, really, whether the sea was any calmer for it, only that it moved in the cycle that was always the same, tides rising and falling as the position of the Moon said that they must. And that above all else they must guard against any change in it.