Strange Noises Fiction by Rachel Greenham

The storm goes on for hours. There’s nothing to see but rain and wind-blown bits of trees. But over time the gap between the lightning and the thunder grows. The battle is moving off. I can only guess which side might be leading the other away from the islands. Perhaps there are no ships left on either side, and it’s just the remnant artificial storm blowing itself out.

The cloud starts to break up over our atoll and the sea calms down. By the time sunset comes, it’s clear almost to the horizon in the direction the battle went. There’s no sign of them. The ocean and the lagoon water have thorougly churned together and look black. I can see some of the remaining sailboats haven’t survived; either sunk entirely or listing badly or draped with a fallen mast. Others are scattered, having snapped their anchor lines or just dragged their anchors, I’d guess. I look for our sloop, the one I’ve hardly been on since arriving at Denhall, but still, it’s in my name, and I think of it as ours. It’s still there, and it looks intact.

“But we have to wait here,” one of the mothers insists. “The Satthei will come back.”

Sam sighs. It’s been going back and forth for a while now. “Beni, how much drinking water do we have?”

“Three flasks and a bit.”

That shuts everyone up. “There’s eleven of us,” Sam points out. “That water isn’t going to last us to the end of tomorrow. Even in the best case, and the Satthei and the rest of the fleet are fine, they’re over the horizon.

“Can’t we get some from a spring?” one of the kids asks.

“It’s an atoll,” the eldest girl replies immediately. No springs, just a lot of rain to keep the plant life alive. And no knowing when it’s going to rain next. The Sattheis are usually a little more subtle with their weather manipulation. It could take a while for the local climate to stabilise. A little more presence of mind during the storm and we could have rigged something up to collect some of the rain. Oh well, more XP, I think, feeling a little gallows about it.

“There’s water stowed on the sailboats,” Sam points out. “Question is do we use it sitting here waiting for the Satthei to come back or do we use it getting to the next port?”

“We have to wait for the Satthei,” one of the women says again. “She’ll come back.”

“Have you ever seen a battle like that one?” Sam asks. “Any of you?”

No-one answers. Then, realising what Sam needs to convince them, I raise my hand slowly. The whole marketeer fleet knows my story; at least they know as much of it as I do. This just reminds them. At last there’s real fear in the eyes of the women and the older children.

“What is the next port on the route?”

“Taka’utuk,” I say, in unison with a couple of others. “Six days, thataway,” I add, pointing. Neri direction sense and a look at the charts the previous day are useful.

“Six days as the Satthei sails?” Sam asks.

“Well, the whole fleet.”

“With a convenient following wind,” Sam points out. I get the message, belatedly, and I’m not the only one.

“Can’t you make a wind for us?” Beni asks me.

I shake my head. “We’ll have to do it the old-fashioned way.”

I’m met with blank stares, except from Sam, who sniggers.

“What?”

“I think rustling up a following wind is the old fashioned way,” she says.

“Oh.” I can’t help smiling at that. “Well, they tend to follow prevailing winds anyway, ’cause it’s less disruptive. So we should have a reasonable chance of a good wind anyway.”

“I say we make for Taka’utuk. If the Satthei can, she’ll—”

There’s a noise that doesn’t belong among the trees behind the bivouac. The bow is back in my hand, arrow nocked and drawn, within a couple of seconds at most. I silently give thanks to Deidas for the drills. Sam still beat me to it, and she’s edging around to the back of the bivouac.

Everyone goes very quiet. I listen, trying to widen my awareness as Sam focuses more tightly on where the sound came from.

There’s another sound, dead ahead, and we both train our bows on it, then someone bursts into view through the screen of greenery.

“Hold fire!” Sam calls, unnecessarily.

It’s Lotan. He’s carrying a sword that doesn’t look like his own. I can’t remember if he brought his ashore. He looks excited and flushed from exertion. “We need to leave,” he says sharply.

“Yes, we just decided—”

“No, right now. Slavers.”

One of the women gasps.

“Oh how I love to be proved right,” Sam says sarcastically.

“I could hear you lot arguing from halfway across the island,” Lotan says. I hope he’s exaggerating. “They know you’re here.”

“Where are they?”

Lotan points. Back the way he came.

“How long?”

“Five minutes?” he speculates in English. Jeodine doesn’t have that much granularity in time units. “Don’t count on it. They might come out along the beach.”

“Right. Everyone, packs on. Tani, get Petals and MothLeaf turned over and down the beach. You,” she points at the eldest of the children, the curly-headed blonde girl in a long white smock, “help her. You,” she points to one of the women, “make sure we don’t leave the water behind, you,” he points to the other one, “make sure we don’t leave any of the children. Leave this,” she bangs the top of the bivouac. “Move!”

I move first, quickly getting my pack on my back.

“What do I do?” I hear Beni ask.

“You keep hold of that baby. Where’s that sling? Get it on, quickly.”

I grab up my bow again and run to the little upturned Neri boats at the edge of the beach. The girl that Sam sent with me looks about ten years old. She takes charge of Petals, turning it over and dropping the detached mast and yardarm inside. She looks like she knows what she’s doing. I do the same to the larger boat, dropping my bow in as well, then we’re both running down the beach, hauling the boats by their mooring lines. At least they’re light and the sea’s high, so there isn’t far to run. Soon we’re splashing in shallow water, deliberately not going far enough to be fully afloat. Seeing the other girl already doing so with Petals, I jump into the boat I’ve been pulling and start putting the mast up. It slots into place cleanly with a locking bolt, and I manhandle the yardarm with the furled sail into place.

Then I have the time to look up the beach. Ateis and the three other children are running towards us. Beni and the other women are following, carrying things. And there’s Sam and Lotan at the rear, mostly coming backwards, looking and listening into the trees and along the beach. The light’s fading. Somewhere on the other side of the island there must be a great sunset going on.

No-one else is coming onto the beach. I can’t believe we were the only ones left behind. I wonder if everyone else has been captured already, or if they’re too scared to come out, or refusing to believe the Satthei won’t come if they just sit tight.

I look the other way, spying out our sloop, still lit by pink sunlight. It’s the biggest intact-looking craft in close range, and I know it’s fast. I just hope whoever’s been sailing it since Denhall has been looking after it.

“Miss Taniel,” the girl in Petals says.

“What?”

“There’s not enough room!”

Shit. I look at the boats, and everyone running towards us. “There has to be,” I mutter. We don’t have time to find another boat. Quick tally: Five children between three and ten, four adult women, one carrying a baby in arms, me, and Lotan, who’s big. One small dinghy built for three adults, one even smaller, built for kids. “There has to be,” I say again to myself, thinking furiously.

I yell back, “Can you sail Petals alone if you had to? It’ll be heavy in the water.”

The girl looks around herself at the boat again, appraising it with a sailor’s eye. “Yes.”

“Okay, you stay there.” I clamber back out, remembering to grab my bow, and splash over to Petals and turn to wave the four smaller kids in. The six-ish boy reaches me first and I lift him over the gunwale of the tiny boat. “Come on, come on,” I call to the little ones, and lift the first one that reaches me over. “Go foward—”

I hear the unmistakeable sound of an arrow being fired. I spin around and look back up the beach. Sam is nocking another arrow. Beni is getting aboard the bigger boat, her baby safe in the sling at her hip, I see. One of the others is dropping flasks into the boat, then climbing in after. I’m aware of the older girl behind me lifting Ateis into the boat, then the other little boy.

And there are our pursuers, at last, all attempts at stealth abandoned, running out of the tree cover onto the beach. Three, eight, more than ten… All men. I can’t tell what weapons they’re carrying. I don’t even have to think about it. I nock an arrow and draw back the bow. I remember Deidas’s voice, ‘Make your targets. Do not fire randomly.’ A moment of calm, of understanding the shape of where everyone is going, and I let the arrow loose. The hiss of the arrow flying away from me, the thrum of the bowstring. I keep watching as I nock another arrow, and the man closest to catching up with Sam falls flat. Sam breaks and runs down the beach towards us. I make my next target and I fire. Another running man falls. I’m already nocking my third arrow.

“Why aren’t they shooting back?” Ateis asks, standing in the boat behind me.

“Because they want us alive,” the girl at the tiller tells her.

“Ateis, get down out of sight!” I hiss. It’s probably too late for that, though, I fear. I turn my attention back up the beach. “Oh you’re kidding,” I mutter in English. Lotan hasn’t run with Sam down to the boats. He’s standing his ground between us and the oncoming slavers, raising his sword. “Oh fucking hell, Lotan,” I say to myself, and aim and fire at the slaver closest to him.

“Tani, we’re leaving now!” I hear Sam yell. “Push off!”

I don’t even see where that arrow goes. Without thinking, I turn and dump my bow into the boat. It lands awkwardly across Ateis and one of the other little ones. I start pushing the laden boat away from the shore, so it can get properly afloat.

“Crowd up forward you lot!” the girl tells the smaller kids, and I see them do so, getting out of the way so I can come aboard. Finally it’s afloat enough for the wind in the sail to pull it the rest of the way out. I grab the gunwale before it pulls out of reach and kick out with my legs and crash with very un-elvish lack of grace into the stern of the boat, at the girl’s feet. I can feel the sail really grabbing, the rush of water on the other side of the hull from my ear as the little boat heels over hard.

“How’s it handling?” I ask, trying to right myself without trampling the smaller children crowded forward.

“Like a scow. We’re on the good tack though. You want to take over?”

“No.” I get up on my knees and retrieve my bow and step up onto the gunwale on the higher side, to pull the other side a bit higher out of the water. I get an arrow ready, balancing on the edge. There’s nothing to shoot at. We’re already out of range. I can see Lotan swinging a sword and one of the slavers going down. Then he’s running after the remaining slavers, back into the trees. I lower my bow and return the arrow to the quiver and step gingerly down into the boat, only then realising what I’d just done. “You’re doing great. You know where we’re going? That sloop there.”

“Yes. I’m following them.”

The other boat. I look across. It’s very low in the water. I can see two of the women doing the sailing. For a moment I panic because I can’t see Sam, but then I do see her, just as she sits up at the bow next to Beni. Is everyone else aboard? I wonder. I have all the kids with me except Beni’s baby.

We must already be fifty metres from the shore, and the distance is still growing. I look for Lotan on the beach. I can only see bodies. I can’t tell if his is one of them, but I don’t think so. The last I saw of him he was doing the chasing.

Now I start shivering.

I killed three men.

Two for sure, I think, trying to account for it all. I hadn’t even hesitated.

“Why do you let her tell you what to do all the time?” the girl asks, breaking my thought-chain with something irrelevant.

“What?” I ask back. “Who?”

“The bossy one that dresses like a man.”

“Uh…” Sam? “Does she?” I hadn’t thought what Sam was wearing was especially masculine; not today anyway, what with that bra that was all she had on her top half most of the day. The girl must have seen us around when we were in port a few times. Maybe that’s what she was referring to. Sam did have a bit of a penchant for mannish fashions in the evenings, when this child should have been in bed, I can’t help thinking, feeling suddenly very English. Leggings and long boots almost to the knee and a flouncy blouse and a frock coat were typical of the style she was developing for herself when we were in civilised parts. I just thought she looked a bit butch, in a stylish, dandy way; a bit piratical.

“You’re always doing what she tells you,” the girl says.

“Well…” I’m at a loss. I’m also having to think about what we’re going to do when we get to the sloop. Is there a chance that there’s an intruder on board? I don’t think so; it was always in view from our temporary camp. “She’s smarter than I am,” I say. It’s all I can think of. She gives me a funny look.

“But you’re—”

I glare at her. “Not as smart as she is,” I say firmly. “At least, not as quick-witted. Look, she got us all away, didn’t she?” Except Lotan. I needed to talk to her about that. It wouldn’t be out of character for Lotan to just charge the enemy horde and be damned with tactical retreats. But Dave? “The Satthei listens to smart people, doesn’t matter if they’re Neri or not. Why shouldn’t I?”

She seems to accept that, grudgingly.

“Hey, girl, what’s your name?” I ask, remembering I didn’t know.

She grins. “Asu… Asuti.”

“Asuti. That’s pretty.”

She smiles for real. “I’m— Deregan’s my brother,” she explains. “He said I have to stay with Beni and the baby.”

“Ah.” I can see the resemblance now. “I think I might have seen you around. The rest of you,” I ask the smaller children, “what are your names?”

“Garelan,” the boy says. “That’s Ceslan and Jalese.” The name gives me a jolt. It’s just a coincidence, I have to tell myself. It’s not an uncommon name. Two small scared-looking faces gaze up at me. I smile, trying to look reassuring.

“They’re Demele’s twins,” Asuti says. “Garelan’s Chirasel’s kid, aren’t you?”

Garelan nods.

I look back at the island. I can’t help thinking that Lotan’s still alive, but we can’t go back for him. There’s just Sam and I with bows and a boatload of women and children to look after. I catch myself feeling angry at him for that. I woke up this morning still angry at him for Jalese and Kerilas, and now he goes and does something like this. Something stupid-heroic that saves the day, as if he knew there wasn’t room for him on the boats.

And I killed three men.

And I haven’t got time to think about that now.