Day 62,
Morning thought: Where does all the metal around here come from? I’ve never heard anyone mention or read anything about mines, miners, or mining. For that matter, most of the buildings in the Village proper are stone, so where was that quarried from? From what I’ve come to understand, this island is mostly either jungle or cleared space used for farmland.
I went to go see Pat today. He was in his home for once rather than on one of his usual walks about the Village. It was a quaint, round little building near the apex of the hill the Village is built on the side of.
When he answered my knock at the door he invited me in for tea without even questioning my arrival or asking why I was there. Accepting the invitation out of reflexive politeness, I was soon shepherded into the house and shown to a well-worn, yet still plush seat that was probably a few times older than I am (assuming I’m as old as I look and not just sixty two days old). The old man started fussing over my hand once he noticed the bandage on it. I insisted that I was fine, just a minor accident, I’d already seen the doctor about it, but maybe I should ask for instructions before I try filleting a fish again, and no it’s fine that he hadn’t cleaned a fish himself in decades, that's not what I came to ask about.
Satisfied that I wasn’t silently dying in agony from my wound, the elder set to putting on the tea, waving off my offers to help, telling me I was a guest and should relax. Some minutes later once both of us were seated with steaming beverages in front of us (which I couldn’t help but raise an eyebrow at given the tropical heat) Pat asked me what it was I wanted to talk about. Or was this a social call?
In that moment, I couldn’t bring myself to talk about my meeting with Theo and the lingering doubts and suspicions it left me with. Instead I think I surprised us both in obliquely asking about something related that had been bothering me.
I asked Pat to tell me a story.
Not a story brought by outsiders like ends up in the archive anthologies, I clarified. And not a reminiscence of old times. A story that came from this place, these islands, this Village. A myth, a folk tale, something told to children before bedtime. Something I wouldn’t have a version of in my pre-waking memories.
Pat laughed, saying it’d been a long, long time since anyone had asked him for that. He asked me to give him a moment to remember one, steepled his fingers in front of him and closed his eyes.
For the next several minutes I waited in silence, alternating between blowing on my tea and sipping on it, wishing it would cool faster. Worrying my host had fallen asleep I eventually reached out to poke him, getting scarce more than a hairsbreadth away when his eyes abruptly snapped open and I snapped my hand back with a stifled squeak, hoping he hadn’t noticed.
What follows is my attempt to record the story Pat told me, although it’s missing most of the finer details and most certainly fails to capture the spirit the old man put into the telling.
Once, there was a girl. She lived in a cottage in the woods. She lived with her mother and her mama. Two separate women, mind you, and the girl thought of them both as her two and only parents. And the only other people she had ever met. Still, she was not lonely, precisely. Her mother taught her to know the creatures of the wood, and there was not a beast large enough to climb that she could not ride. Meanwhile her mama taught her to commune with the spirits of that place, the sprites, fairies and gods, both kindly and fearsome. And so, even when the girl went out into the woods without her parents she was never truly alone.
Still, with time, the girl grew dissatisfied with her life. Thinking merely to entertain her, and perhaps to indulge themselves in reminiscing as well, girl’s parents would tell her stories of their travels and adventures from before they settled down in the forest and had her. And the girl loved these stories as much as her mother and mama loved telling them. So much that she wanted to travel and have adventures of her own. At first, exploring the forest was enough, even if she had to go ever farther and farther out from the cottage to scratch the itch. But even then, it was still only her forest, just different parts of it. She wanted to see mountains. And deserts. And plains. She wanted to meet other people, even bad ones. She wanted monsters to fight and real danger to overcome.
Eventually, the girl’s parents realized what their stories had instilled in their daughter and chided themselves for not expecting this. Afterall, had they not reacted the same way to similar stories at her age? They sympathized with their daughter, seeing themselves in her, but having been so much a part of the world before and having seen hardships their little girl could not yet imagine as the price of those adventures, they were tired and weren’t ready to end their peaceful rest apart from the larger world. And so, they told the girl that “One Day” they would all leave the forest on an adventure together when she was “Older.” And in their hearts, they really did mean it, even if they had no idea when “One Day” would be and weren’t sure themselves what age “Older” was.
And so, the girl, even though she loved her parents and knew they loved her, grew frustrated with them. “One Day” never seemed to get any closer and even though she grew older every day it never seemed to be enough to count as “Older.”
This frustration led to keeping a secret. More than anything, the girl wanted to see the ocean. Her forest had ponds and lakes, streams and rivers, but no sea. That may sound strange to us who see the sea every day, but not all worlds are alike. While it might be wondrous to us to see rain transform into tiny white crystals that float to the ground like leaves and sparkle like glass, to the girl such a wonder was merely called “winter” and was as normal as the rainy season. And so, wishing to see the sea the girl built a boat on the edge of a river. For months whenever she told her parents she was going out to play she would go to her boat and add more to it, until one day it was complete.
The following night, the girl snuck into her parents’ room and took her mother’s sword and her mama’s hat. With sword on back and hat on head, she stole into the night to board her boat along with her two closest friends, the little black fox and the big white cat. With the morning light they set sail down the river, for the girl had heard in stories that all rivers flow to the sea eventually, and the little black fox confirmed to her that this was true for he had seen the sea himself, or so he said. The big white cat said nothing, as was her wont; sleeping in a sunbeam on a ship’s deck was as good as sleeping in a sunbeam on a cottage roof to her.
For days they sailed, their spirits high and their bellies full from all the snacks the girl had stored away while building the boat instead of eating when they were given to her. But then
Maiko showed up to check on me. Wasn’t expecting that. Wanted to make sure I was alright with my hand. That it wasn’t making it hard for me to get food or that it hadn’t “gone bad” (I guess she meant gotten infected?). I reassured her that I was fine but that I appreciated her concern. Let her know that I don’t usually go gather my own food or hunt or fish or farm. That people give me food (or other things to exchange for food) in return for me writing things down for them or finding things in books for them or sometimes telling stories for them. She found this strange but figured it explained why I was writing in journals all the time and had books around the house. And why I was so weak and tiny. I’m pretty sure that last part was a joke, but she can be hard to read.
I asked if she wanted to stay for dinner (I’d gotten carried away with the writing and had forgotten to eat anything yet myself), but she declined, saying she already had eaten. As she started to excuse herself to leave, she stopped, started to ask me something, paused for what felt like a solid minute or two, and then asked that even if I hadn’t met anyone else like her, had I maybe read something about them in one of my books? Since finding information in books for people is what I do.
Feeling like I was letting her down before the words left my mouth, I said that I hadn’t, even though I’d been looking since I met her. She said that’s what she expected, but looked visibly crestfallen all the same. On some perhaps misguided impulse to lift her spirits I mentioned that some friends and I were going to try to try to board the floating island when it passes by Siren Overlook at first light seven days from now. It was a long shot, and we probably won’t, but it’s not impossible that from the air like that we might see signs of people living outside the Village that would be missed from the ground, especially if it passes over other islands. Again, we probably won’t find anything, but I promised to keep an eye out while we were gone just in case and tell her all about it when we get back. Unless she wanted to come with us and see for herself. Then again, I knew she’s not keen on being around people and I immediately regretted saying it, worried that I might be coming across as trying to pressure her into it, and digging my conversational hole deeper with each awkward apology about it.
To my surprise Maiko stopped my rambling and told me she’d think about it and proceeded to leave as abruptly as she tends to do.
Urgh… it’s late now. I’ll have to finish recounting Pat’s story another time. For now I’ll just say that it went on pretty long, the river took the girl to a number of different worlds instead of to the ocean where she found out that adventure and danger, while exciting at times, is also a lot scarier and more unpleasant than stories make it sound, and when she finally reached the sea it was on a world suspiciously like this one but with an impossibly tall tree instead of an impossibly tall tower that she climbed in hopes of returning to her parents in the forest, but the story ends without saying if she made it home or not.
I tried to get Pat to discuss it afterwards as I tried to analyze it, but he seemed to want me to figure out any meaning from it for myself. The one part he did comment on was my asking if it was really a story that came from this place given all the elements that seemed foreign to the Village. The description of snow, the mother’s sword, horses, mentions of war in later parts… Pat said that just because they didn’t have these things here and had no record or memory of them being around, that doesn’t mean they don’t know what they are or that they never existed. Afterall, outsiders often had dragons in their stories but most claim those things weren’t real in wherever they came from. He refused to elaborate on any of that further.
In the end, I’m not sure if the story was a warning against leaving a peaceful life and looking for excitement and answers or an endorsement of it. And the ending is unsettlingly similar to what I’ve been told about outsiders disappearing in attempts to ascend Cloud Tower. Was he hinting that’s a way to leave the Village and go someplace else or saying that trying to ascend is a fool’s errand that will leave you lost instead of finding whatever it is you think is up there? Then again, if it’s a story that actually happened in some form and if that last world the girl visited really was this one, and she told her story to the people of the Village at that time, then it makes sense that the story would end with the start of her ascent since no one left behind in the Village would know the result. It would also imply that other worlds really are a thing and that there are ways to travel between them, and outsiders’ scattered memories of past lives might be real and that they actually did exist before washing up. Or the girl could have been an outsider that washed up and grew frustrated with the lack of a past so she made one up.
I’m just running my mind in circles now. Time to sleep so I can catch the usual ride with Cass and family to the Village for market day in the morning.
