Rain pattered down on her wings as she woke. Today it was fheylli, the lukewarm pattering of droplets sparse enough to count, if you tried. Tear rain.
Her beak prodded through the clay vessel hanging off her chest, streatching the wings over her head, long, thick feathers flexing gently as they directed the rain around her body. There was a sandworm, a meaty string hiding between the twin blades of its shell, and next to it a clam, the sensitive insides of her beak finding it coated in grains of drying mud and sand.
She tugged the sandworm out, resting on her winds as a foot took it and, with a practised motion, split it in half. The worm inside slid down her throat with a satisfying wetness.
With a creak she reminded her long legs that they could move and, with a stretching of wings to balance, she stepped from the small rootmat, browning matter lingering from the summer’s growth, into the endless expanse of the mud.
“Ehshtzi orrr voucwen,” she groaned. Stars be drowned.
She started the walk. If she kept moving away from the dawn, parallel to the distant shore, then eventually she would find a tuughokuvai to take her the rest of the way to Otceihorrr Krrrheta.
She stalked off towards the stygian blue of the morning horizon, the softness of the mud dotted with the transient shapes of raindrop impacts. Her splayed feet left a train of fading lines behind her, straight from her heart to the rising sun.
This mud was thick and sticky beneath her steps, veined with tentative rivulets forming from the thin layer of rainwater sitting just on the surface.
As the sun rose and the bluish mist woke from the mud, stretching into shifting whorls, she caught sight a bubble rising, some distance away. Slowly, half-spreading her wings as she hurried closer as softly as she could, she crossed the distance to it and, with a swift, clean motion, dove her beak down into the mud and grabbed hold of the creature below.
It wriggled fiercely and in drawing it out she lost her grip, jabbing around blindly before her beak hit something solid and grabbed ahold of it again, this time exposing the muddy, furious lump to the open air. Ectikuvai. Mudcrab, paddle-limbs flapping madly as though it could flee to the sky.
Into the pot it went.
Hopefully it would not eat the clam.
With a quick wipe of her beak on the clawed joints of her wings to get the worst of the mud off she started the walk again.
Midday. The blue sun hung high and the mud was lukewarm beneath her feet.
Somewhere, just at the edge of the horizon, there was a shape.
She squinted. It danced in the shimmering heat.
“Kta ullullwi…” she muttered. It wasn’t a rock- too smooth, too dark, and besides there was no solid ground for weeks. Too small to be a tuughokuvai, not a clump of reeds…
Well, it wasn’t moving, and it wasn’t hiding, and it wasn’t the shape of the things that could eat her. With a clack of her beak she started striding in its general direction.
It didn’t take long for her to see that she was wrong. It was a tuughokuvai, and it was dying.
In the endless instant when its eye met hers she recalled what she had been, once, and the walk, the practised walk that had worn groves in her joints in every summer she had made the journey from place to place, the thread holding their slowly fading diaspora together, was forgotten in long leaps across the mud.
“Thetwei oulaci,” she called. “Ollguunei, heiu, heiu!?” My darling. Progeny of the mud, how, how!? The tuughokuvai- young, barely a decade old, it should still be tracing the currents of the deep, far out of sight of the shore- showed no sign of response but for a slow drooping of its eyeplate, the endless dark of its eye clouded and frightened.
She reached out to comfort it but it flinched, legs pushing it, limping, backwards, revealing pooling blood beneath it.
“Thetwei oulaci,” she whispered.
She backed up a step, two, and against the burning instinct under her breastbone she settled onto the mud.
She took a few breaths to settle her heart before finding the right song. The calm, looping syllables crooned through the air between them until, her throat sore and the muscles at the base of her beak cramping, she saw the panting of the tuughokuvai’s gill-flaps slow to a steady heave.
“Outawh, outawh,” she said softly, taking a tentative move forward and, when the creature did not flinch back, another.
It stood at twice her height even young and sunk into the mud though it was, twice as wide as that and tenfold and tenfold times as long, her- in the time she had sat still and sang and looked her in the eye it had come to her that she was a’thteph, the waxing warmth to her waning sun, clearing skies where she was approaching rain.
Behind the broad oval of her head the segments of her body stretched, netting and woven baskets hung from her carapace, hardened-clay nests set against the chitin, now days abandoned. Most terrible of all were the tattered remains of her tailfin, flaps of leathery skin that should have dropped off when she was old enough to leave the sea permanently.
She rested her claws on the broad, mottled chitin of the tuughokuvai’s forehead and saw with anger that there were binding spikes driven into her skull, uneven, clumsy, brutal work that had left white scars where they had failed to join the sacred skyiron spikes to the young titan. She was too young to be bonded. She was too young to choose.
“A’gurrruk,” she growled. Monsters.
She settled into the loose mud under its eye where it could see her and thought, humming softly.
High above the eggshell-blue sun watched, small and dispassionate.
She was a child again. Ceigha Llounwei, echoing be His name, was beneath her, a tuughokuvai that had lived longer than the tales could reach. She had just flown for the last time, though she did not know that she would wake up the next morning with her flight feathers scattered over her nest.
She darted between the narrow walls of clay and reed that grew off the warm, worn chitin of the titanic crustacean like polyps, hopping up section after broadening section of the creature until she got to the place where she could clamber up run across the rounded rooftops. Up here, the breeze in her feathers, she could see the edge of Ceigha Llounwei, the sheer sides of its carapace stretching from its head to its tail, the drop between each layer as deep as an adult could stretch their neck. From beneath the curtain of orange bone the long, trailing paddles of its many limbs moved one by one in a great rippling wave, the constant slap-slap-slap-slap-slap that was nestled behind her eyes along with the pounding of her heart. From here, running, leaping, darting between box-gardens full of the leafy tops of ocutu and hurrri, setting wind-charms jangling and ducking under wicker figures set with shed feathers and bright glass, she felt like she was the open sky itself.
She clung to the warm, gently smoking cone of the algae-flour drying room and looked down on the city, almost a hundredfold dwellings of clay and mud and canvas and wicker and smoke growing from the back of the tuughokuvai like the living thing they were, flashes of cream-and-grey clambering and carrying and working and living on the back of Ceigha Llounwei, echoing be His name.
We the claws that weave the nets that feed him, she sang, quiet into the wind. He the embrace that holds us fast. We the spears that keep him safe. He the hearts that lift us from the mud.
Before her, toward the highest point of the city, the place of the speakers lay, just past the latest row of homes and forges, right atop Ceigha’s skull, where the Uewllwu sang to Him.
She adjusted her grip on the drying-room’s curved chimney, the rough clay leaving ochre powder on her wings and the soft plumage on her breast. Between her and the winding cones of the Uewllaigh, strung through with holes that hummed and bellowed in the wind, was nothing but a daub-and-wicker wall circling around His brow.
She had crossed the city a thousand times over and knew it like the inside of her beak. Had foraged in the mud below, last summer even swam in ocean waves in the shadow of the mangroves. But never had she been to the head of Ceigha Llounwei.
And with a dart, a jump, a scramble and a drop, she was over that wall.
Besides her, mired in the present, the tuughokuvai’s eye closed.
She thought faster. Forwards. A blur of intervening years, heartbreak, illness, hunger, tentative love and sunlit days- There.
“Ounuci ton wierrr.”
Child no more.
She had found her at the top of the Uewllaigh, staring out at the setting sun with eyes that could make out nothing of it but a wash of gentle colour.
The Eldest Uewllwu, bound in song to Ceigha Llounwei, turned her baleful gaze toward her, feathers bleached grey and white by age and weather ruffling into a smile.
“Thteph… llui tesstk, cenn oiull.” I… will die, you know.
“Tot setk?” Not soon?
She warbled, laughing. “A’ehshtzi, ton, ton!” She lifted her face to the sunset and spread her wings as though she could catch the last fleeing rays and store them for the night. “Hei tolgh amourall ka veou cagh.” I have everything to live for. “Ana… a’hei taage vuil.” But… we must talk.
As she stood and listened, one claw on the parapet and the other hanging in the empty air, she learned that she was to be bound to Ceigha Llounwei, echoing be His name. She, who had stumbled into the Uewllaigh and was found only hours later meeting the eye of the tuughokuvai in curious silence before being bundled under a wing and marched back to her mother, who had spent every day proving that she could be strong enough, kind enough, pure of voice enough to sing to the titan.
And now-
The flashes of memory rose frustratingly slowly, like bubbles crawling out of the mud. Further.
“-Ku taage tot enge horrr!”
-It must not be true!
“Tawen ku,” the Eldest snapped. Bear it. “A’tuct taage tawen ku. A’tuct eioll ton lluccu.” We must bear it. We have no choice.
“Ana-”
“Ton!”
“Ku taage tot enge horrr!” she screamed, as though mere volume would make it true. “Ku taage tot! Ku taage tot! K- ku taage- ku- k-”
A claw grasped at her shoulder. “Uewllwu,” she said, blind eyes burning into hers. “Ollehshtzi atei tuugoh pher vugh.”
Singer. Progeny of the stars, you are stronger than this.
Her breathing steadied into a hiss.
“Cenn uawn phorc awaiwai ka Ceigha Llounwei.” We will speak to Ceigha Llounwei again.
The heart of the Uewllaigh was the heart of the city. White columns of terracotta and woven branch sheltered the hall from every kind of rain and each of the sun’s faces, the floor Ceigha Llounwei. It was dark in here, small circular windows pouring only the fading dregs of the evening light into the room. A thin, cold breeze blew motes of dust into the god-rays crossing from the left side of the room.
“Olla, toutu,” said the Eldest to the lone Uewllwu in the chamber, apprentice Tkoukai. Child, leave. He tucked his broom under a wing, bobbing his head in deference, and hurried out.
He paused as he passed her, eyes wide and neck-feathers flat with worry. “Ka Ollguunei… llouki?”
Is He okay?
“Toutu, toutu,” she said, the Eldest’s eye boring into her.
He scurried out.
Between every arch, each set into their own alcove, were binding rods wrought from iron fallen from the stars, boring straight into the brow of Ceigha Llounwei, echoing be His name, where once antennae had been. Six in total, each etched with the patterns of the wind and sea, from where tongue and throat and song had been born.
With them, they could sing to the tuughokuvai, and He could speak back.
They settled to the ground either side of the thirdmost rod.
The Eldest’s claws struck the metal, once.
In the quiet that followed the Eldest’s eyes roamed. He was usually quicker to respond-
All six rods hummed.
He was listening.
The Eldest hesitated, then with a clenching of her beak began to speak back in a looping pattern of striking and drawing her claws along the metal.
Venerable, the Eldest played into the rod, the scraping and tapping dotting the sound of the wind through the windows. I, Eldest, sing. Of what we spoke before, we ask again.
Silence. Then, the rods spoke back, their carefully tuned humming forming cadences soft and precise.
My heart sickens, sang Ceigha Llounwei. Dark comes. I go to the sea.
She looked at the Eldest. She furled her wings and nodded, once.
Venerable, you sing to the rod with your claws. I, secondmost, sing. Do you talk of death?
I remember a child, sang Ceigha Llounwei.
I remember sun and a child.
Now she asks of death.
The rods went silent.
I am ending, said Ceigha Llounwei, echoing be His name. Flee. Dark is in my mind. I go to the sea.
The wind stirred fine motes of dust. All of a sudden, for the first time in her life, the subtle warmth emanating from the titan beneath her felt utterly intolerable. Like she was standing on a corpse.
She opened her eyes and rested a gentle claw on the young tuughokuvai beside her.
That night, long ago, the Eldest had died in her sleep and the weight of her people’s hopes and fears fell on her back.
Ceigha Llounwei had become harder and harder to sing to, and when He did it was in things that were only half words, speaking in hunger and fear. Again and again, the sea, the sea, the sea.
They had taken to the mud and begun the walk in groups, each seeking asylum or death alone. There was nowhere on the mudflats that could support an entire city of refugees. The last group, her at their head, had only left when Ceigha Llounwei left land behind entirely, bobbing in His wake and watching as he vanished to the depths, the homes they had built washed off His back with the force of his passage. The last she saw of her home was a flotsam, a scum of clay dust and garden soil and torn wicker drifting into the stars on the horizon.
Long and hard had she fought to keep their city together, trekking the mudflats and finding where her people had vanished to. They had made homes wherever would take them, younger tuughokuvai cities boarding as many as they could take, the rocky spires of Otceihorrr Krrrheta absorbing the rest into its vertical shanty-town of grease and tar and charcoal dust. And she had held them together step by step, story by story, not in the hope that there would be another time for them to live in the light in a home of their own but to remind them of what they had been. So that Ceigha Llounwei would not be a senile giant seeking the dark sea’s quiet to die but a living city, a titan, a tuughokuvai, to echo His name.
She, Eldest uewllwu.
Watching a second god die.
“Ton,” she said, “Ton, thtet uawn tot.”
No. No, I will not.
She stood, shaking the creaks from her joints and clacking her beak. The tuughokuvai, sensing something, raised its eye plate and followed her with its huge pupil.
Okay, she thought. Firstly. Who had used her.
She climbed up onto her back and began inspecting the detritus- there. A broken pot abandoned here. Kzataszjekagh script, but there, behind it, a nest with traces of down in the rotting bedding. Multiple co-habiting species, and…
She squinted.
A bronze knife with the blade bent beyond use, stamped with-
The pillar of smoke above the spires of Otceihorrr Krrrheta was a filthy, choking black. When she first saw it, she had thought the world was ending.
Around the six rocky spires, each longer and taller than any tuughokuvai, a web of wood and brick and rope and mortar grew like obscene barnacles, a dark mass of soot-caked earthen tones like overlaid scabs. Even the mud itself had been laid with paths, channels draining the water into a cannal that led from the heart of the place toward the sea.
Under a swaying lantern, sat between bunks in the room that her people shared with etulltphi who spoke their tongue in strange ways and dyed their feathers in stranger patterns, she learned of the existence they had found here.
Deep beneath, they said, taken by burrowing molluscs four times as long as she was tall, down where the mud hardened, were rocks from which shining metals could be wrought. Down there was where they went. Collapses were common and children were prized most of all for being small enough to scurry the mines. Those that did not go down beneath were not given food, they said. Those that did not work were left to die by those who sought to trade the bronze.
And above the doorway and on every band and brace and tool of bronze, the symbol-
Of an eye with a hammer for a pupil.
They had been fleeing the red-brick furnaces of Otceihorrr Krrrheta. Likely had not seen a tuughokuvai in generations. That meant that this was not done in malice but ignorance, on half-heard tales and binding rods passed down as heirlooms.
It had been done in ignorance, not malice.
And in hope it meant that whatever injury the young titan had suffered could be healed.
She tore the bedding up, held it close to her nose. It reeked of stale sweat, mould and urine. She judged it to have last been slept in at least four, perhaps five days ago.
“Ehshtzi”, she said to the wind. If She had been abandoned then and not yet died… the injury might not be internal.
She hurried to the tuughokuvai’s head and knelt by the binding rods.
If She had learned…
She scratched at the keratin and hummed, hoping the tuughokuvai could hear and be calmed.
Slowly, she struck the closest binding rod in greeting.
The response was immediate. The tuughokuvai bucked, surging forward in panic and throwing her to the mud below in a flailing mass of feathers. She landed on her left wing, bending it painfully, but immediately threw herself forward, scrambling to reassure the titan. The tuughokuvai collapsed into the mud before she could reach its head to comfort it, wheezing. She had never heard a tuughokuvai wheeze before.
She could not talk to the little tuughokuvai that way, then.
“Hei taage otoc voark, llouki?“ she said, working the soreness from her wing. I must go under, okay? The tuughokuvai showed no signs of having understood, eyeplate shivering, pupil still tracking her.
To speak to a tuughokuvai with voice alone was not an art she had had time to learn and never practiced, for Ceigha Llounwei had been deaf long before even her grandmother’s grandmother was hatched, as was natural. And… teaching one language enough to communicate that she needed to inspect an injury would be…
She rubbed up and down her beak with a claw.
Names.
She would start there.
“Ophoulli,” she said, rapping a claw on her breastbone. “Ophoulli.” She held up the clay pot hanging from her chest. “Ciuco.” Reached inside it, pulling out the wriggling mudcrab within. “Ectikuvai.”
The pupil shrank. Flickered subtly as it focused on each in turn.
“Ophoulli.”
The pupil met hers.
Objects were easy. Now for the concept she needed to impart.
“Kakekak!” she exclaimed, raising her wings in mock threat. “Kakekak!”
The tuughokuvai flinched but did not retreat. Its eye plate lowered. It understood.
Kakekak. Danger.
“Hssi,” she said, as softly as she could. “Hssi.” She wrapped her wings across the tuughokuvai, eye shut as her browbone met the carapace below the titan’s skull.
Safe.
“Ophoulli hssi,” she said, staring into her eye. “Ophoulli hssi.”
The tuughokuvai blinked, a slow moving of its eyeplate, then closed its eyes.
Hope against hope she understood.
Ophoulli straightened, ran her claws through the feathers of her head, and without ceremony tucked her long beak against her breast and began to crawl under the carapace of the tuughokvai.
It was dark underneath. It smelt of fish and iron. Her legs shifted, fighting to keep her from sinking into the mud.
Breast sinking in the mud, head knocking against the underside of the tuughokuvai and blinking the dark out of her eyes she waited for the blackness to subside.
When she saw, she felt at first a surge of fear, and then, at last, an overpowering relief.
She had cut Her forelegs and, under the threat of its unrepentant masters, they had not had time to heal.
Already her mind was whirring. She must have dragged them over a submerged rock sharp enough to cut through her young carapace and they may be infected, so they would need dressings, yes, and splints- she could repurpose the netting still hanging from Her, use what few medicinal herbs she carried to clean the dripping wounds as best she could- eshtzi, she would need more and it wasn’t the season for it but-
Ophoulli breathed.
There was a river wide enough for the tuughokuvai two day’s walk behind her.
If she could heal it to the point it could float down it…
She closed her eyes.
She had come here to watch a death.
A tear pressed out between her left eyelid before she snapped her eyes open.
There was much work to be done.
The spring wind blew through her feathers as she stretched her neck to catch it.
Ceigha Akaawei, Echoing be Her name, was beneath her.
With a splashing and slapping Houb climbed out of the shallow sea and up the netting at Ceigha Akaawei’s side, long tongue sliding out of his wide piscine mouth as he pumped water out of his gills.
||Many fish,|| he signed, his four muscular hindfins pushing him into a slumping upright stance despite the gentle rocking of Ceigha Akaawei. ||Hunt! Feast! Now!||
Ouphoulli adjusted the vessels hanging from her breast and shook her head. ||I stay,|| she signed back. ||Tired.||
Houb panted. At first, her knowledge of the people of the sea a fragment of a fragment of a story of a faded myth, she would have seen this as the convulsions of an animal. But here and there she had learned the nature of expressions bare of beak and feather and neck and could see, clear as a cloudless winter night, worry writ on Houb’s body.
||I grow old,|| she signed, reluctantly. ||Go alone.||
Ceigha Akaawei sent a call rippling through the water as Houb took a few steps towards her and rested a fin on her shoulder. Beneath the fat and gelatinous skin she could feel muscle gently shifting, strong and full of young life.
||Rest,|| he signed. ||I bring fish.|| Then, with sudden gravity, he formed another sign, his forefins moving slowly and certainly.
||She will heal by summer,|| he signed. ||Then you find the wandering tide you look for.||
Her eyes drifted to westward.
And then, she thought, And then to Otceihorrr Krrrheta.