"Come Back to the Sea" is the story of Yukio, who hears the sea singing and sees disturbing visions of the water swallowing everything she knows. Is it all in her head? Or is the sea really coming for her?
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
"Come Back to the Sea" is the story of Yukio, who hears the sea singing and sees disturbing visions of the water swallowing everything she knows. Is it all in her head? Or is the sea really coming for her?
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
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Overview
"Come Back to the Sea" is the story of Yukio, who hears the sea singing and sees disturbing visions of the water swallowing everything she knows. Is it all in her head? Or is the sea really coming for her?
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781466854918 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Tor Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 10/15/2013 |
| Series: | Tor.Com Original Series |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 32 |
| File size: | 609 KB |
About the Author
Jason Vanhee has been writing since before he can remember. Engines of the Broken World is his first published novel. Jason lives in his hometown of Seattle with his husband, Adam.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Come back, come back to the Sea where we want you.
A young woman looked down from a slit of a window, four feet high and only a foot across. Below her, in the silvery light of the half-moon, the waves of the cold Sea shimmered as they sighed in toward the pebbly shore. One hand held shut the robe that was loosely wrapped around her wide frame, the other was poised to pull closed the shutter which would shield the window from the storm that she could distantly sense approaching.
Come back, come back to the Sea.
The young woman — but no, she was perhaps just a girl, fourteen or fifteen years old — the girl looked down at the waves that left a soft white foam at the water's edge, trying to find the source of the voice that called up to her, singing gentle, mournful words.
Come back, come back to the Sea as you long to.
There. Something — a shadow, a shape like a person, half-risen from the water. If only she wasn't so high up, on the topmost floor save one of the towering pagoda. Or if the moon was brighter tonight, then perhaps she could pick out some feature, some hint of who was calling to her.
Come back, come back to the Sea.
Her lips moved, silently mouthing the words as the voice sang them faintly up to her. A man's voice? Surely it was a man. The girl leaned slightly forward, her hand slipping from the silken closure of her robe to settle on the windowsill. Who are you? she wanted to call down.
"Yukio, why are you stirring?"
Proctor Sumiko. The old woman's hand snaked out to supplant the girl's at the shutter and pulled it closed with a clack of wood on wood, the snap of the hasp settling into place.
"Come away from the window, Yukio," the proctor said. She shut the waxed paper panels in the wood frame of the window and latched them. The girl let herself be led away, back to her little room down the hallway, to her narrow bed.
Though the window was closed, though the shutter was sealed, still she could hear it quietly, like the soft hissing of the waves: Come back, come back to the Sea.
*
At the end of a narrow rutted track that ran down through slate escarpments was a high, narrow stone structure just above the pebbled shore of the cold Sea. Though it was formally known as Spring House, the name was never much used, and both the residents and the folk on the forlorn barrens above called it the House by the Sea. Here were sent — or sometimes came of their own will — the children of the nearby villages who would not act the parts the gods had assigned them: youths who failed to find charm in the tilling of fields, maids who did not delight in wading knee-deep through rice paddies. Once they would have been sent to monasteries to chant the glories of the Hundred Gods, or beaten out of their villages and made into vagrants. But now it was to the House by the Sea they came, and dreadful rumors were whispered of what happened to the children sent there. Whispered, because none ever returned to their villages — to their lives of earth floors and thin hides tacked over windows, of endless meals of salted fish and vegetables faded or pickled or dried, of bare feet and thin smocks and grinding labor.
Yukio did not find Spring House so dreadful as childish imagination had suggested, though it was certainly strange. Eight years already she had lived in the House, a life of hearing odd stories she never understood and taking lessons that seemed without purpose, of hunting for crabs with teams of other girls every morning and reciting numbing chants in the evenings after dinner. She didn't see the point of most of it. The proctors said they would, each of these children, turn out to be remarkable — Yukio was meant to control the wind and waves — but how this result was expected to occur from the proctors' teachings she couldn't discern.
When she woke in the morning after Proctor Sumiko had shown her to bed, the air was chilly and damp, the promised storm sweeping in over the fathomless gray of the Sea. Faintly, she could hear the echoing trills of paired ivory flutes dancing around one another, and she knew that her friend Ami was at her lessons.
They had let her sleep very late, Yukio realized. If Ami was already at her flute, Yukio should have been down by the water's edge gathering up little crabs for lunch, as she did every morning, whether it stormed or no. Though she had slept so late, she was still weary. The song of the stranger had haunted her even in her sleep, and she had dreamt dark visions of rising waters, but she could not recall any more. She yawned and then rose from her bed, washing her face at her basin, tying back her long dark hair, drawing on her warmest robe, and slipping rough sandals onto her feet.
Proctor Sumiko was waiting for her in the hallway, kneeling with her head slightly bowed. The old instructor looked up at Yukio as she slid back her doorway, a thin panel of pale wood.
"What have you dreamt?" the proctor asked without preamble.
"Good morning, teacher," Yukio said, dropping to her knees and bowing her head. "It gives me pleasure to see you."
"Don't fall back on pleasantries, girl. You are late and we haven't the time. Tell me what you've dreamt."
The girl looked up through her lashes at the proctor. The old woman's mouth was set into a tiny hard knot of pale lips, a look that Yukio had not seen before: the proctor was greatly troubled. The stranger in the Sea was a most serious matter, she realized. For a moment Yukio considered telling her teacher why she'd stood by the window, listening for the song of the Sea — that it wasn't the first time, and that she dreaded it would not be the last. But she didn't speak of the song. She had promised Ami not to.
"I dreamt of waves coming over the rocks of the beach. I dreamt they rose higher and higher."
The old woman's soft left hand snatched at the girl's chin, lifting Yukio's eyes to her own. "Did the water come all the way up to the House?" Sumiko asked.
Yukio shook her head as much as she could with her chin still gripped as it was. "I don't know. I don't remember."
The proctor's right hand connected with the girl's cheek. There was not much force to the slap, but the shock was sufficient to make her reel back, slipping from the old woman's grip.
"You mustn't listen to the Sea, Yukio." The proctor's voice was hard as the slate that lined the road to the House.
"I thought I was meant to master it. How can I, if I'm not to listen?"
"You still fail to understand all we attempt to teach you. There are bounds to your powers, to all powers; and there is great danger in pursuing your gifts too far. I say again, do not listen to the Sea."
"I can't stop it," Yukio said, barely a whisper.
"It will stop," Sumiko said, and rose from her kneeling position. She did not gesture for the girl to follow as she walked down the hall, away from the window that was still latched shut, and toward the stairs to the lower levels. "Soon enough, it will stop," her voice said, coming up the stairwell now to Yukio, still crouched on the hard floor in front of her doorway. "Until then, do not listen."
Faintly, like the echo of the proctor's fading footsteps, Yukio imagined she heard the call of the waves on the pebbled shore.
*
At the top of the House was a tiny attic space that only the children went into, and then mostly when they were young and small. It was dim and hidden and musty, and every child liked to imagine it as a cave where adventures could occur, if only they — the children — were let alone to have them. Directly below it was the bell chamber, home to a great bronze bell and the long wooden rod that was drawn back and then struck against it to call the folk of the House back for afternoon devotions and for evening meals. But in the late morning the gulls owned the place, waddling about on the faded wood floor in the cold air that came in through the open sides of the topmost level.
"Did you hear him again?" Ami asked.
"Not until we're in the cave," Yukio said, gesturing up to the hole in the ceiling. A hundred feet below them the waves crashed against the stones of the beach, and the Sea was listening.
They clambered up the ladder that was meant, Yukio supposed, to let the proctors maintain the bell and its ropes. There were soft swatches of cloth and a sort of greasy polish up in the attic, the only things normally kept there, but Yukio had never noticed anyone tend to the bell. It must have happened, though: the great dome of it was shining and bright where it was not carved with characters of an ancient prayer for safety and strength.
"All right, tell me," Ami demanded, taking Yukio's hands as they settled down onto the cloths, thin but at least providing some padding against the cold hard floor. They had to bend over because they had grown too large for such a small space — more Yukio than Ami, who was fine as porcelain and seemed unlikely to ever grow much more. There was no light save for what came in from the open hatch that led down to the bell chamber, but it was private, and always Yukio felt that the outside world could not come in.
"He came again last night. Came up to the edge of the water, and he sang for me."
"From where did you see him?"
"The window at the end of the hall. Proctor Sumiko found me there. And she asked me about it, just an hour ago."
Ami breathed out. "You didn't tell her about the times before, did you?"
"No, I promised I wouldn't. This is just for you and me," she said, and leaned forward to take Ami's tiny hand in her own plump one. Her friend smiled and tilted her head down slightly, a mild blush playing at her cheeks. "I heard more of the song, too. I think this is all of it. Listen."
And she sang it, as best she could — chanted, more like, for they had no training in songs but only in the praises of gods and spirits.
Come back, come back to the Sea where we want you,
A shudder ran down her spine as she finished chanting the words.
After a moment Ami raised her gaze to Yukio and was now all seriousness. "Do you really long to go to the Sea?"
Yukio thought of her friend and shook her head. "I want to stay here with you."
"Of course. We'll always be together." She laughed lightly and then was solemn once more. "I'm not a proctor, so perhaps I'm wrong, but I think it's still not gone too far. The window at the end of the hall isn't yet so bad. You haven't gone down from your floor?"
Yukio gave a violent shake of her head, but said nothing.
"You can't, you know. Whatever it is in the water, it wants you. Wants what you'll become."
"What I'll become? How stupid of the Sea, then. I may become nothing at all."
"That's not true. We're both going to be great mistresses of the waves. The Sea will come when we call, and the storms will rage at our command.
But our command, Yuki. We must lead, not be led by the waters."
It sounded so grand when Ami said it, and the proctors seemed to think it was meant to be. At times — like now when the Sea was speaking to her — Yukio, too, accepted her supposed future fully. The omens of their birth marked them for it: Yukio had been born on the night of a great wave that almost destroyed her village, and Ami had first drawn breath on a cliff top in a storm so wild that it had knocked down her ancestral home and left the infant exposed to the wind and thunder, sheltered only by her frightened mother's arms. It was clear that both of them were destined to be magicians of the waves, however one achieved such a state. No proctor in the House could clearly explain their techniques, and they were honest enough to admit that sometimes they were wrong, and a boy or a girl in their training would become nothing more than a man or a woman.
"Why do they want me then, under the Sea?"
"To stop you controlling it?" Ami suggested. But it wasn't much of an answer. There was no answer. And even there, even in the attic cave up under the sloped, wavelike rooftop, the sound of the surf came to Yukio's ears very faintly, wrapped under and around the screams of the gulls.
*
Come back, come back to the Sea where we want you.
How loud it was, the song: she had her ears covered with her hands, her head under her thin blanket, her door slid shut, and yet Yukio could still hear his tune coming up from the deeps.
She tossed off the blanket and rolled to her knees in her shift, dragging her robe around her shoulders. Rising, she thought of lighting a candle but decided against it; someone would notice, she was certain, and the proctors would find out. The door slid open with ease. A rich, briny smell came in from the hallway. In the dim light of the one lamp left lit overnight, Yukio saw a long, tattered green mass huddled at the base of the wall opposite. Seaweed in the crannies, and one little crab that came out from it toward her door. She slammed it shut quickly.
Come back, come back to the Sea.
She would look. She would see what the Sea was showing her. But when the panel door slid back into the wall once more, there was no green there, no little blue crab. The air smelled of the salty tang of the waves as always, but not of the ripe shore as it had a moment before.
"What do you want?" she whispered.
Come back, come back to the Sea as you long to.
"I don't want to go to the Sea," Yukio said firmly. She stepped into the hallway. The other students' doors were all slightly ajar, some an inch open, some as much as a foot. It didn't make sense: everyone slept with their doors closed. She stepped to the nearest, the room of a boy of ten called Kenjiro, and pushed it farther open.
His mat was sodden, the blanket pushed up to cover just the boy's face. He wore a wrap around his waist with most of his body visible, and there was something wrong with it: pale and bloated and slightly, ever so slightly wrinkled, like a very old man's skin. Yukio took down the lamp and brought it into the little chamber, and saw Kenjiro clearly.
He was dead, dead and sea-claimed, like the bodies that washed up after great storms, when a ship had sunk. She had seen those more than once, and he looked just like them. Carefully, she crept forward.
Come back, come back to the Sea.
Yukio knelt down beside Kenjiro, her knees landing on the edge of his sleeping mat. Cold water soaked her robe, the edge of her shift, her knees. She shuddered. Her lips were shaking now as she reached out her free hand for the blanket that covered Kenjiro's face. Her stumpy fingers pinched just one tiny fold of the fabric, wet under her grip. A moment's hesitation, but then she knew she had to see what was beneath, and she jerked the blanket back.
She screamed as she saw him, his eyes open, his mouth wide with tongue swollen, dark hair plastered down by the waves. As small as a fingernail, a little blue crab crawled from the hollow of the drowned boy's ear and started the climb up the slope of his sea-wrinkled cheek.
Yukio closed her eyes.
"What are you doing?" a boy's high, confused voice asked.
Her lids flickered open. Kenjiro was alive before her, his chest uncovered as she held his blanket back from him. He rubbed his eyes sleepily.
"Are you all right?" she asked.
"Is something wrong, Yukio? Why are you here?"
She pushed up from the ground and retreated from him. "Everything is fine," she said.
"Okay," the boy murmured, already drifting back to sleep.
Again in her chamber, Yukio felt at her knees, at the still coldly wet patch on her robe, on her shift. The air felt heavy with pressure. She stared at her doorway, listening for faint scuttling on the ground, for the sound of the rising tide, for the Sea coming to press in on her, but there was only the still of the night.
*
The storm was finally gone the next morning. "We will walk the beaches and look for flotsam," Proctor Sumiko said. The wind was still blowing strong from the north, icy cold and unforgiving, but the air had cleared almost entirely and the Sea was a startling blue. Yukio and Ami and four others, three boys and a girl all about the same age, wandered in intersecting lines up and down the beaches, the shale cliffs rising above them, broken stones unsteady under their sandals.
"There was seaweed in the hall last night," Yukio said to Ami. They had wandered far from the rest, west along the beach with the sun behind them. "And a crab. I saw Kenjiro dead, drowned in his bed."
"You were dreaming," Ami said. "Just a bad dream."
"No. It wasn't a dream. My robe was wet."
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Come Back to the Sea"
by .
Copyright © 2013 Jason Vanhee.
Excerpted by permission of Tom Doherty Associates.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Title Page,
Copyright Notice,
Begin Reading,