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

(43) Homecoming

I'm sad to leave the temple the next day. It's an island in the Shalda-sana. A haven. A home. I know the level of safety I'm attributing to it is probably either self-defense or an illusion, but I hold fast to the belief that it's safer than most places in the ocean, and Taiki's response to it does nothing to prove otherwise. He's quieter in the morning, and I stick beside him as we pack up to leave again. The more capable villagers have taken up the rear themselves, and I'm glad to see them already adapting to life down here.

And then we're back on the current. Taiki doesn't say much, and neither do I. I think he's fighting whatever pulls him back into dark mental spaces, because he begins to startle worse than usual, and to check where I am more and more often. I want to keep moving as badly as he does, but I'm concerned for him and all of us if he continues to lead while slipping into this state.

And so, the next time we stop for a rest break, I pull him aside. "I want to help navigate," I sign. "What are you following, and to where?"

Rashi be blessed, he's not so spun out yet that he can't see me. I think the question brings him back a little, because a faint smile twists the corners of his mouth, at once tired and grateful.

"This current goes most of the way back to"—it's an island sign: one with a long tail off the side of it. I mark it down mentally, though it means nothing to me yet. "It's got three strands between the islands before then, and the last one crosses it and breaks off into the three-moon deep. We want to follow that one."

"Will your tribe be there?"

"I know where they go."

"Is it somewhere I might be able to find if you're not around to?"

His hands pause for a moment at that. "I think so," he signs at last. "Most people can't, but you might be able to."

That sends a warm breath through me, cozy with something between pride and relief. I don't know why it never occurred to me that he might see me the same way I see him: an equal in a world where both of us have struggled to find one. Was that why he was never particularly close with anyone in his tribe? Rashi help me, he's probably never had the humility issues I have, but we might have more in common than I thought after all.

I focus again and let him know I'm paying attention.

"The current breaks not far into the three-moon deep," he signs. "That's where most people get lost, because you have to find your way for about half a moon without another marker. I use the shrimp? There are schools of them between the Shalda-sana and the Sami-sana, and they start chattering at night. You'll probably be able to feel it if you pay attention. They follow surface currents that curve off in another direction, so you have to move at an angle to the line the shrimp follow."

He draws it out, and I repeat it back until I can recreate the coordinates and angles as smoothly as if they were another sign. It would never have occurred to me to navigate by the sounds of living, moving creatures. If their patterns are even half as predictable as Taiki makes them out to be, though, that's smart.

After that, it turns out a lot of his navigation is based on animate things. The movements of fish and the sides of rocks that corals grow on; the presence of particular flavors of water-algae, and the nightly migration patterns of small jellyfish. There are inanimate cues, too: patterns in the waves that indicate the presence of atolls too far off to see, the structure of the rocks at the bases of intermittent seamounts, and of course the currents.

A lot of it is memorization, but there are overall patterns I can already start to see. It's like the ocean is slowly lighting up before me after I've spent a moon fumbling around in the dark. It's not just water. It's far from just water. And even in the utter absence of physical landmarks or even the sun to tell the way, there are ways to tell both where you are, and which way you're going.