The Reed-fish Girl of Comara Cove, by Michelle Browne
“Taba!” screamed Bone. He rocketed towards her, across the sand. “Look at the purple glass!”
“Well done,” said Taba, smiling brightly. “Go show it to Tal.”
Bone grinned and sped towards Tal, who patted his head and told him to look for more. Relieved, Taba straightened her head wrap and tucked her dreads back under the scarf. An unravelling tassel from the ends fell on her shoulder, and she slipped it into a pocket to sew on later, dusting off a golden brown shoulder absently. She ran her hands over her equipment and her belts, making sure everything was in place, and squinted as she walked out of the cave. Time for another round of searching and salvaging, picking through whatever washed up from the great glass ships.
The sun was extremely bright today—too bright for her preferences. She preferred the shady days when warm rains blew in, even when they brought storms, as in the winter season. It was easier to find the frosted Glimmerglass when the light wasn’t catching on every wet pebble and shell—though the iridescent shells were easier to spot in the sun. A trade-off, she supposed.
She glanced behind her, but the children hadn’t worked their way across to her section of the beach yet. If it hadn’t been for her ruined arm, she would have been out pearl diving, fishing farther out…no sense fussing about it, though. Better to look for the glass, and the shells, and gather as much as she could. The wrecks from trading voyages each winter were still sending their fragments ashore—bits of polished bone, sometimes, but the broken cargoes of Glimmerglass from the Falachi Islands continued to wash up.
They were expecting a convoy of traders any day now, and Corr kept reminding her of that. “Everyone needs to do their best,” said the old matriarch, puffing her pipe and staring Taba down. “Everyone. If we don’t get enough trinkets for the northern nobles and their whores, we won’t get our spices. We won’t get lemfruit.”
Taba’s cheeks burned. She loved lemfruit. As the sun beat down on her now, she imagined a fresh lemfruit, warmed by the sun, sweet and faintly salty as a woman’s…well. Not that she’d know, but as she assumed it would taste. She heard the sailor women talking as they went out on the boats, leaving the men to tend the hearth and salt the fish, and she longed to join them.
The ocean called to her, but her ruined arm kept her on the shore. She was old enough to marry, old enough for the adulthood ceremony, old enough to take to the water and work. But that arm was an excuse—a reason for people to treat her as fragile, even though she wasn’t really. Concerns about whether she could pull her weight, muttered behind her back, the elders looking slightly guilty when she walked in on one of their discussions…no. And perhaps they were right. Her arm did slow her down a bit. Loneliness shivered through her as she watched the young children scampering across the shore, screaming at each other and splashing. Some were intent on tidal pools or their tasks, picking up bits of volcano glass as well as the Glimmerglass, shells, and other flotsam and jetsam.
Tal, the minder, pattered after a few of them. He was big and strong, but a quiet man—and after a gish shark had taken a bite out of his right leg, he couldn’t dive for oysters without succumbing to panic. He was nice, had even offered to marry her when she’d had her ceremony, but she didn’t like men in that way. And then, too, he was broken, like her. She didn’t want to be the crippled girl for the rest of her life, a discarded toy—loved, perhaps, but useless. A crippled woman with the status of a girl, holding back everyone else because she had to move more slowly on account of the weak, damaged limb.
Tears prickled her eyes. Too much self-pity. Better to focus on hot sand under her calloused feet. She watched for sharp stones, the occasional crab, and the slightly iridescent, softly frosted Glimmerglass. Her bags clanked—clattering bluegreen and orangepink shells in one; soft lumps of brown, green, and blue glass in another. Bits of red and orange were the hardest to find, and yellow, rarer still, but she watched for it. A few cool, polished lumps of pottery hung in a belt dangling from her waist. Those could get a good price, especially with the faint colours traced on their surface. She hoped for starmetal, but that washed up very, very seldom.
She was so intent on looking for bits of glass—the broken ones as well as the softer, time-frosted ones—that she almost didn’t see the girl curled on the rock, shaded by the dune, her skin blending into the sand. At first she thought it was one of the children, resting from the sun. But the girl wore no sling around her chest, nor the rough sackcloth that young children wore. The girl—woman, really—turned, and Taba saw her lithe frame, skin that was light brown and dappled by shadow, the same colour as the sand. Taba met the girl’s dark eyes and felt her heart quiver, a strange longing flooding through her. The girl broke her gaze and cried out in alarm—not an animal’s howl of fear, but language, Taba felt sure. As she dove for the pool, Taba saw a silvery, scaly flash, a shimmer of fins and a tail.
Her heart pounded. After a hundred years, the seafolk were back.