Stone pebbles and mossy dirt had ground into Arn’s forearms, knees, shins, and one shoulder, as he had wrestled his raft down the slope on the rollers he had made with Thalla. It had taken nearly two hours, but Arn wiped his skin clean again with a fur rag after hammering a peg in between a few rocks. A brilliant gleam pierced the air over the island as the sun broke the horizon at last.
He was sitting on a log of driftwood, watching the salt waves lapping his creation against the narrow gravelly beach. This was the only stretch of coast this side of their lagoon that wasn’t met with jutting boulders or stark cliffs. Arn knew because he had walked the whole length of it.
As dawn crept across the mathhar forests and saltwater bogs of Razaad, Arn rose from his tree-trunk seat and picked up the enormous guiding pole he had prepared. It was time.
He snatched the sinew rope free from its binding and splashed through the gentle tide waves to scramble aboard his creation. He checked that the sack of food and filtered water he had prepared were still tucked securely between the wooden slats of the raft’s surface—just a precaution—and took a deep breath. All things ready, he slid the wooden pole into the Deep and shoved away from Razaad.
Arn knew that thinned tree trunk in his hands would not guide him to Scoa. Today’s goal was not to triumph over the Deep, but to learn from it. What problems would he need to solve? Would the waves be his first obstacle—enormous swells that the peninsula guarded their lagoon from? Or would it be difficulty steering from the force of moving such a long pole through all that saltwater?
The bottom curve of the sun left the grey ocean horizon as Arn guided his raft further from the shore. He was blind to the bottom of the Deep, but he knew it was there. His rod found its purchases amongst whatever crevices, muds, and shadows lurked down there, and he watched the beach he had launched grow smaller and smaller. The heat began to increase, burning through the windy air to tan Arn’s scarred skin. In beads, then drips, then rivers, sweat began to blind Arn’s focused eyes.
This was his day; this was his true fight. He would teach the tribe to hunt the islands beyond Razaad. Stone Spear had given him importance, but the task had existed before that. It had existed before Arn had even dreamt of it. He stabbed the Deep again, dragging his raft forward with a gradually shortening length of the pole. Memories of killing Onolan surfaced, knocking him down and knifing him once in the leg, then in the gut, then in the ribs. With six feet of tree pole left, he jabbed forward again. And again.
Rising and falling, the waves tilted his raft up and down, but nothing threatened to capsize him. The raft held together solidly, and its thickness prevented water from splashing the wooden surface where Arn stood.
He prodded the ocean bottom again, but fell to one knee as his pole sank nearly out of his grip. There was nothing there. The bottom of the Deep was gone. He scrambled back, to the other side of the raft, thrusting his tree pole with all the strength of a spear jab, trying to find the corner of whatever hidden cliff he had just drifted over. His pole grazed it—Arn felt the scrape of rocks under sand against the bottom of his guiding rod—but then again plummeted out of reach.
“No,” he gasped, staggering and reaching with the pole for any purchase. Maybe it was like a riverbed? A dip in the land under the Deep? He crossed to the front of the boat, and extended his pole in that direction. No purchase. Nothing. “No, no,” he whispered. He looked back at Razaad’s distant coast. The island still covered most of the horizon there, while Scoa had only grown slightly against the ocean horizon.
Arn was adrift over the Deep. I was supposed to be able to stop and turn back when it got too deep… He had it all planned, but now his pole rested on the raft beside him, as he rotated his posture and sat on his backside. All of this work and he had no way of controlling it anymore.
If he swam for the shore, Arn might be able to make it. It would surely cost him all of the work he had done, two months of toil. But it might not cost him his life. He looked toward the horizon. The raft was still aimed toward Scoa Isle, but he had no clue if the ocean waves would even let him go much deeper. Each swell lifted his raft up as many as four or five feet higher. As he sank into another valley, he knew he had to decide right now.
Arn slowly looked away from Razaad. He balanced his stance on the surface of his raft and lurched with each wave as his muscles grew more accustomed to moving with the water. They might have to become far more accustomed. He dropped the guiding pole in a niche that ran the length of the raft and sat down on its horizontal bump. The raft would bring him toward Scoa, or the waves would carry him somewhere else, but he would find out where.
Only a few minutes passed before Arn looked back over the salty waves at the rocky cliffs on the horizon. Razaad had tried to kill him nearly every hour of his life, but it had sharpened him into what he was. He would to all in his power to one-day return—after all, that was the goal of this very craft.
As he entered the currents of salt water between the isles, he realized that Scoa was easily twice the size of the rocky rise they had seen from his village. The curve of the land blocked itself. He had only glimpsed a portion of what this world offered him, and even that had inspired him to climb aboard a raft of wood, reed, sinew, and mud. He spent the morning drifting parallel to Razaad and Scoa’s coasts, watching obscure shores passing him like black smears across the limits of his vantage.
The salty waves rocked him up and down; he was tilted, flat, then tilted once more. The bright sky began to grey around midday, and he thought about Thalla, following him around one overcast-but-dry day to see how he hunted. Onward his water craft lurched. The Deep’s wide breadth, like the amorphous scales of some beast once preyed upon, swished all around Arn’s precarious life. The sun beat down upon Arn’s tanned shoulders, and the future reached out its talons to sink them, mercilessly, into Arn’s unknown fate.
The strong current pulled the hunter’s raft into Scoa’s rising afternoon tide. He lifted his stick to prepare for whatever obstacles awaited him. The tall rocky cliffs cast shadow from the afternoon sun, blocking his view of their base.
Ahead, a wall of seafoam and saltwater droplets rose above a jutting rock. As Arn’s raft followed the rippling eddies past the bulge, he abruptly realized how fast his little craft was moving. Another ridge of rapids tossed him back a step as he spread his legs and surged forward, into the shadows of the cliffs. He raised his guiding stick as his boat and he approached a third, larger rock. Salt splashes deafened his ears, but his senses were blinded by their previous four hours of depravity. His raft and he would not strike it, but nonetheless, he prodded the rock with his staff as they buffeted past it. He didn’t budge his trajectory but felt splinters and shudders damage the wooden pole.
But the Deep had been hunting him for those four hours, he realized. Dread yanked his stomach down under the surface as he saw the hunter’s true strike coming. The rest had been deception—greater than any of the very best plots on Razaad. A line of tidal rocks rose ahead like the maw of some unearthly monster.
Arn dropped to one knee, fumbling for his pouch of preserved meat, his boiled bladder of clean water. He lost his grip on the guiding pole, but it didn’t matter. With one hand clung to the raft and his other to his supplies, he faced the otherworldly attack with his warrior’s face.
The Deep dug its teeth in and tore to shreds all of Arn’s fierce ambitions. The raft crashed against the scattered wooden boulders hard enough to split the varnished mud that sealed it. Planks of wood and logs splintered up and out. Arn slid forward, skinning his leg across slivered wood. The corner of a rock caught his momentum, gouging his foot as he tried not to twist deeper with the raft. The largest portions of wood had already splashed backward, and, clinging to one shard of his raft, Arn spotted the follow-up attack.
A white-crested wave came smashing down upon his teetering vessel. Everything went black, and Arn lost his agonized footing. Something ripped across his face, and his hand lost its grip on the wooden beams of raft to brace his head. As pain like he had never known scorched his nose and cheek with saltwater, his seized muscles waited for another impact with the rock that would not come. Not for a few moments of panicked, water-filled gasps.
Arn crested the surface but found himself unable to see. He wiped his eyes with his free hand, astounded that his other still held his supplies. His vision was streaked with water and blood, his hand that had wiped it free was covered in red. He didn’t have time to check what the rock he’d been smashed against had done to his face, for the valley between waves was nearly closed and he was somewhere between the ridge that had impaled his raft and the cliffs of Scoa ahead.
The next wave hit, but he remained in a lull, free of rocks. The current yanked him forward, closer to the stone wall. There was a crevice nearby, though it was probably five or six feet above the surface of the Deep.
You will not claim me, Arn hissed, sputtering for breath. His free hand clawed the water and the next wave sent him in the direction of that angled fissure. With the swell, he got enough height to see a proper ledge in the shadows of the cranny. He paddled onward, soon with only one eye opened; the other was splashed with salty, smeared blood.
At last, he was close enough. He shifts his grip on his supplies—they were going up before him—and waited for the next crashing wave. He shoved off of the cold, rough rocks with his single-remaining tattered sandal, and smashed through the white-crest, but let its might shove him back again. As the surface of the Deep swelled, he shoved his water skin and fur pack into the crevice, but scraped a few layers of flesh off his ribs as gravity yanked him down with the surface once more.
Gaping for breath, he trod water as he waited for the next attack to lift him higher. His arms and legs felt like chunks of driftwood, flowing wherever the sea manipulated them. In the shadows of the orange afternoon sun, Arn shoved his pained feet off the rocks and into the next crest. This wave brought him just as high as the last, but it was only high enough to get one shoulder and his arm onto the ledge.
As the wave declined, he hung with all his might to the ledge. “Ah—!” he shrieked, as he wrested his other arm further. Blood and saltwater drained off of his animal hide trousers, staining the cliff-side below him with rivers of his struggle. He roared wordlessly as his knee found sharp purchase on the vertex of the slippery precipice.
Scrambling onto the ledge, Arn clutched his supplies close and pressed his back against the ledge. He let out his breath, then sucked in another. His mouth filled with blood. When he was sure that the waves didn’t reach high enough to wash him away, he dropped his rations into his lap and gingerly touched his face with his exhausted fingers. He could barely move the one that had been slashed in his fight with Shar. Before he could brave the pain of his face to examine it further, he let his hands fall to his sides and chuckled. “Shar is resting by some fire on Razaad right now…” he mumbled, and spat his stained phlegm off the rocks.
He lifted his hands ones more. A strip of flesh as wide as his forearm had been ripped off, from under one eye to the corner of his jaw on the opposite side. There was very little left of his nose, he realized, amidst trembling fingers and blinding agony. He had suffered enough injuries to know that despite the pain, he was not feeling it truly. He was in a daze.
But he could not let the daze put him to rest here. The tide was still coming in, scattering wide the wooden bones of his raft, months of work torn to shreds on the rocks.
There was another ledge a few feet above him. He climbed to his feet—though one had been gashed thoroughly along the bottom by rock. He gingerly changed his remaining sandal to that foot and tossed his rations up above. The climb was treacherous, but not as much as the splashing spray of the Deep down below. Even there, the predator waited for him. “Not today,” Arn whispered, as he shimmied up to another handhold. You cannot kill me today.
By the time he reached the ledge, Scoa had nearly done what the Deep could not. He rolled onto his back, panting for breath and wincing every time he contorted his face. The salt had cleaned out his wound, he hoped. He slid his supplies into one leg of his fur trousers, so they would not slip off the damp ledge, and then he let the exhaustion take him. Dark tendrils of the dreamworld reached for Arn’s blood-shot eyes. The laughter of the bearded man or the guidance of the swimming water-scale did not find Arn’s solitary, splintered mind, but his own voice told him to keep breathing.