Listen to the Water | FULL SERIES | Wattys 2022 Shortlist | ✔

(22) Sar: Calamity

The second half of the story is a gripping build-up of emotion. There are names tagged as people or locations, their spoken and signed forms lost to time. Then—islands. Not the whole island chain, but the lower tail of it. The older end. It was important, somehow. There was fighting here, in both the upper and lower water. That's a sparsely inhabited area now. There aren't many islands that stand above the water; most have worn down to deep-water seamounts too far from the sun to support corals. Those are under Shalda control, followed by a handful that the Karu have held for hundreds of generations because they're below the temperature line. Sami who go to the island chain to have their pups want warmer water.

This was a Shalda-Karu conflict. There's fighting in the surface waters elsewhere in the ocean, but I can't see much trace of Sami influence. There are lines that make me wonder whether the Sami and Shalda were connected, but as the focus on the lower island chain intensifies, mentions of the open water fade. I'm coming towards the end of the prelude story. Even without knowing what's going on, I find my own heartbeat beginning to intensify. I'm reading the setup of a cross-ocean catastrophe. The characters in the story are probably doomed. Did they know it, at the time that this story was being written? Or was this documented in retrospect? It's impossible to tell. I could look ahead for clues, but I can't tear my eyes from this part of the wall.

I haven't reached the guilt-annotated line yet. Some part of me strains towards it, until I'm startled back by the appearance of another anomalous blip in the text. It's motion where there shouldn't be motion. I stare at the symbol for a long moment, unable to process why it looks so strange. It's water. Open water, I think, but written on a slant that normally implies motion. That's just a current. Why did someone write a current without the current annotation? There are more straightforward, built-in ways for this language to convey water motion. I set the anomaly in one pocket of my mind and keep reading.

It's not a current.

I dart back to the anomalous symbol. The writing that comes after it is talking about more things moving—Nekta, Kels, sea-dust—and the tone annotations are turning uneasy. This isn't a current. It's water that's not supposed to be moving, but is. Now the parallels with the present day intensify. Twelve generations ago, my people recorded a story from a Saru people seeking refuge in Rapal. The first thing they said was that the ocean between Ashianti territory and the islands wasn't moving the way it was supposed to. That's when this all began.

Nekta began moving. I scrutinize the symbol on the wall. I can't tell what kind of Nekta it's referring to, but its shape has attributes that make me fairly sure it's some kind of fish or squid. A near-island species. It's written with the same slanting motion as the water-symbol. Migration, maybe. That's what we suspect helped start the conflicts that began twelve generations ago and persisted through to today. The conflicts that led the islanders to flee to the islands. Fish began to disappear in an already unstable region, and the fight for territory became a fight for food. From there, it just spread. Or at least, that's what Rapal's scholars can guess happened.

There's more motion ahead. From where I'm reading onwards, it becomes the norm: the calamity story itself is written almost entirely in slant-hand, as though nothing during that time sat still. It's what led me to wonder at first if it was exaggerated. But I know otherwise now. Everything begins to move in the story. Water. Nekta. Kels. Whole Kel peoples. I find a stubbornly untranslatable symbol that seems to imply that islands themselves moved, or at least rocks of some kind. I can't make heads or tails of it. There's more fighting. It's all over the ocean now. Still concentrated on the lower island chain, but radiating outward as far as—

Rapal.

The story mentions Rapal. My own city's name is one I do recognize in the eel-Kel script, and the sight of it shoots dread through my body. Memories of home crush me from every side. Even in story form, I don't want to see what I already know is coming. I don't want Rapal to die.