Origin: Installment 1

Wherein: Prologue and the Wharshes Arrive

Origin

Prologue

There are only the long, thin stretches of sand, rising like fingers from the water as the sea lowers, imperceptibly, over many, many years.  These fingers grow knuckles of dune, wrinkle and harden, become land.  Rains wash layers of salt away.  Seeds take hold, vegetation rises from the sand, banks are stabilized by cordgrass, sea oat, beach grass.   Pine scrubs grow, weave the shifting surface into land, an island.  This new island forms a collarbone of sand between the ocean and a larger mainland, miles beyond. The pines grow in dark twisted clumps, forming a southward winding spine. A bay forms on one side, ringed with cattail and thick dark mud. There are dunes sculpted into breasts and thighs and shoulders that no human sees for hundreds of years. Everything is brilliant with sun.

At the island’s center, water begins to gather in low, dark marshes. A swamp is born of storms, wind, held wetness. Grasses send floaters out on breezes, to catch and fly across the small waters, land in new fertile patches. Gum saplings inch their roots into pooled water.  Spaghnum moss creeps over roots, up trunks, to cling and dangle.  Bog ferns emerge from the blackwater ponds to unfurl their wet leaves.

Out on the dunes, gulls call, drop oysters.  Plovers and sandpipers mimic the surging waves. The ocean approaches in glimmering rolls, in deep shadow swells.  Sunlight burns the edges of thick scudding clouds.  Mergansers, egrets, and herons appear on the bay, moving in their steady ways, as always, as ever.  The land develops like this, slow and sunny, for a long, long time.

The first men to climb out of boats onto the land hide their faces from the brilliance of light.  Their voices are tiny and temporal in the winds.  After pulling their boats high on the sand, they stand and look at the wide bright beach.  The spray that smacked their boats as they rowed in the surf drips from their beards.  They are hungry.  They have been lost, trying to find this nowhere place.  They wonder if it can be true, that they are the first.  They walk the long empty wilderness, breathing space into their fragile lungs.  They find the bones of dead things, whitened and silted away, driftwood and shell.  They find the swamp, cool black waters under cypress and tupelo gums.  They find small freshwater ponds.  They find pine-shadowed clearings.

They fall in love; wildly, vastly, inexplicably, a love that blinds like the sun burning down, a love that owns them, like the salt that stays on their bodies from the surf.  These men have dreamt of this place, they have been searching for it.  It can’t exist.  Even as they stand upon it, they cannot believe it.

After days of walking the land, searching for some sign of other men, sleeping under the massive, rolling sky, they turn to one another.  It is true.  It is theirs.  They will risk disease, starvation, deprivation and storm, gladly, for a chance to live in this essence. They crave the fundamental challenge, the intention of survival.  They crave the freedom of unclaimed land, and this is the miracle, unclaimed land has been found.

The day they are to leave no one kneels.  No one prays.  No one weeps.  They shake hands, these men who are suddenly strangers to themselves, brothers to one another, and they turn for one last look at the land they have claimed.

Upon finding this island, this long-fingered branching bone of land, each man knows that what he wanted to begin has begun.

 

Part One

They say that Sillith Wharsh is dead at sixteen.  The children who saw her that morning say that Sillith stepped out into the ocean after the night of the fires.  They say she stood in the shallows, surrounded by a thick bed of seaweeds and lettuce on the surface of the water.  They say the first leaf wrapped round her calf, and then one around her knee.  It went fast from there, a large clump gathering at her inner thigh, another at her waist like an ungainly green infant, and then slap after slap of brown straps, wet greens.  Sillith stood staring down at herself, not struggling, not fighting or making a noise.  The tiny silver fishes came, relentless, leaping up and taking her like that, wholly, with their shivery ranks.  What they could not pull down in her, her head bowed but legs firm, her spine still and strong against them all, the ocean came and conquered in one final wave.  It took Sillith.

Her hair rose over her like a veil as she slid down the curve of the great green swell, hiding her face from those who witnessed.  She was gone.  Her body didn’t wash ashore in a day or so, like the countless other things caught and killed in that consuming pull.  The ocean doesn’t always give the body back, they knew this, so only a few continued to talk and dream of her.

Chapter One

Morning on an Island

Leena Wharsh sat in the boat with her eyes closed and looked at the light glowing through her lids, at the map of red lines there, which reminded her of the criss-crossing inlets they traveled.  She searched the light and lines for pattern, some sense of order, any kind of known thing.  Her own self she felt shimmering out of her, out of the boat, into the surrounding water, washing up against the banks they passed.

She opened her eyes and the day clarified itself, bright, sharp, all of her surroundings peripheral green with rushes.  She watched her husband, Paramon, row.  His hands moved the oars powerfully, digging huge swirls in the brackish water.  Paramon seemed resistant to the physical exertion.  After three days of constant carriage travel and two days solid rowing, she would have expected him to seem tired, but he was cheerful and steady as ever.

Paramon, it seemed to her, was already becoming another man.  The slender, bookish printer she’d married was now burned brown with sun, his hands rusty with blood from the unaccustomed rowing.  His talk, when it came, was of building, of fishing, of making paper from bark.

Water hung in her skirts, and her feet felt swollen and raw, as though they were peeling apart inside her boots.  Five months pregnant, Leena was uneasy.  The decision to settle an island was something from a dream.

Since she spent long nights in the halls of complicated dreams, she was not entirely sure that this wasn’t one.  The recent years following the death of her parents and brother had changed her life utterly, and she still moved inside the underwater quality of grief.  Was she dreaming all of this?  Had she dreamt their deaths?  Would she wake up in the Willik house on the pond and see Paramon arriving to court her once again?  Could this unreality be the real life?

The night Paramon told her about the “experiment,” as he called it, he ate voraciously for the first time in months.  She watched him eat the quail, watched him absently suck his fingers clean and wipe them on the linen napkin, watched him gulp his wine, all the while talking, gesticulating, nostrils flaring.  His usually fine manners were abandoned in his eagerness to carry her into the wilds of what he described.  He shrugged and let partial ideas drop, and began describing new ones, each an attempt to show her how enormous an undertaking it was.

She barely listened, hardly able to comprehend what he was proposing to her (Was he saying they would leave?  Settle a new island?  Become settlers?)  But he’d been so sad and angry, they both had, for such a long time, that to have him hungry again seemed worth whatever it was (and what was it?) that he was proposing.

The oars dipped and pulled, dipped and pulled.  Paramon’s hair was wild with curls from the warm, salt air.  That night of quail and first plans seemed long ago.   Leena watched their wake ripple against the mud. They rowed blind inlets of cattail, following the marks left them by their guide.

Their guide, Savar Leggith, a lowlander, had gone on ahead unable to tolerate Paramon’s slow pace.  They followed a trail of broken and tied reeds, bent into wide knots at every fork.  Leena was better at spotting these than Paramon, as they reminded her of bustles, and the shape caught her milliner’s eye.

Leggith was of the small group of river folk, lowlanders, who were to be fellow settlers of the island.  Paramon explained to Leena that they could never learn the skills they would need to know in such a place without the help of fisherman and farmers.  The lowlanders had been their guides during the exploration to find the island, and sought asylum from the religious order that ruled them.

Regardless, Leena did not like Savar Leggith, especially his rough manners with her.  She knew, now, already, that she had the wrong clothes, wrong supplies, wrong furniture.  She was smart enough to know that for herself and she didn’t need anyone else looking at her scornfully to tell her so.  With his great blond shaggy head and his thick neck, thick hands, thick wrists, he seemed the kind of primitive she’d imagined in the wilds.  He represented everything she dreaded, and the very sight of him added to the boulder of fear in her belly.

Paramon rowed them past a deep black section of water and she saw a school of white fish fanning below.  They were graceful and quiet.  Leena smoothed the lap of her dress, and then looked down at it.  It was her simplest dress, a fine cotton gingham, and she could see how quickly it would be destroyed, how the fabrics she loved and owned had no place in this new world.  The hem of her dress was already ringed black with mud and her sturdiest boots sat like soggy, misfit birds in the silted water at the bottom of the boat.

Paramon spoke, saying, “You look pained.  Are you all right?”  He rested the oars against his chest, mopped his forehead with his handkerchief, which was soiled with two days’ rowing.  His eyes, despite lack of sleep, surprised her with their shine.

“Darling,” she said, smiling, pulling herself up a little in the boat, straightening her damp skirts at her feet. “I was only thinking of tea in china cups.”

He blinked and winced.

Leena said, “No!  No reproach, Paramon. I was only making fun of myself.  Not complaining.  Just trying to make light of homesickness.”

Paramon cocked his head at her and smiled.  He let his handkerchief rest on his lap, the oars held tight under his arms, the paddles dripping wide arcs into the water they glided through. “You don’t have to make light of your homesickness.  It’s brave, but not necessary.”

Leena felt a lurch of emotion, and turned her head away.  Clearing her throat she asked,  “Did Mr. Leggith say when we could expect to reach the island?”

Paramon laughed, his teeth flashing against the new brown of his skin.  “Mr. Leggith did say when, he did.”

“Well?”

“Well,” said Paramon, “I’m thinking of making you pay a tithe for the information.”

“Stop that,” said Leena.

“No, no, I think a tithe is in order.”

“I can’t possibly.”

“Then it will be wait-and-see-pudding as far as when we get there.”  Paramon, grinning at her, let the oars slide to his hands and began to row.

“You have to stop rowing at least!”

“Ah,” said Paramon, “the tithe will be paid, and so I’ll help you, since you are indisposed.”  He shelved the oars along the gunwales, and balanced his slender frame between the hull. Carefully, he swung himself back to crouch before her.  She leaned into him and kissed him, put her hand up against his unshaven, sweating face.  She smelled him, the smell of his cheek and face like nothing else in the world, unmistakably his, unmistakably loved.  She felt less awkward then, less poorly prepared for the trip, less hateful of her wet feet in the bottom of the boat.  She laughed.

“You’ve paid,” he said, swinging back into place and setting the oars into motion again, “so I will tell you what the esteemed Leggith said.  He said it mightn’t not be ‘fore breakfast, or it might.”

Leena raised her eyebrows and said, “Seems a shabby bit of information for a tithe.”

“I’d charge a tithe from you for any excuse.” And Paramon rowed on, staring straight at her so that she blushed and looked at the water swirling away from his oars.

They found Savar on a small, muddy bank, and miraculously, it seemed to Leena, he had built a fire and was cooking fish on something that didn’t even resemble land.

“Be another few hours, that’s all,” he said, while Paramon leaned to catch the rope on something and tie up the boat, “best eat and then get moving.”  Savar pulled a long leaf from the reed beside him, wrapped half a fish in it, leaned out and thrust it at Leena.  She took it from him, and he shoved the fire into the water with his foot, leapt into his own boat, and struck out ahead.

Paramon took up the oars and rowed hurriedly after.  Leena watched the other boat round the corner with most of their belongings piled and tied snugly inside.  She thought of the slates they’d brought for lessons.  Would they be able to teach lessons?  Was everything she’d brought utterly foolish? She could see the curved, elegant legs of her sewing table jutting out, and wished she could touch them, just for a moment.

She said, “You’d think he’d let us eat first, or at least give you a moment’s rest.  Your poor hands are worn through.”  Paramon didn’t look at his hands and had not complained about them once, although the oars were stained with blood beneath his thumbs.  He looked over his shoulder for Leggith’s direction.

“He’s got a wife and children on the island, you know.  Probably anxious to get back and check on them.  He’s been gone a month, Leena, gathering supplies and us.”

“No,” said Leena, unwrapping the fish and eyeing the boat floor with reluctance, “I don’t believe he makes himself anxious over anyone.  This seems his most natural state.  Rowing, dashing here and there among the other animals, making his little savage meals.”  She let the weight of her baby pull her forward and down, slightly, and sank to her knees in the water at the bottom of the boat.

Paramon, turned toward the bow, was unaware for a moment of his wife’s position, and when he turned back and saw her, he exclaimed, “Leena!”  She steadied herself with one hand, placed the leaf on Paramon’s lap and opened it, scraped a mouthful of the flaking white fish from the skin with her fingers and offered it to him.  He’d been rowing all night without food, and she was relieved to have something besides stale biscuit to offer him.  He shook his head, taking the fish in his mouth, staring down at her and when he had swallowed, he said sadly, “Your dress, Leena, it will be getting all wet.  It will be ruined.”

Leena half-smiled and said, “An excuse to make more.” They glided past tall banks of reeds, the oars dipping and pulling, filling the silent weatherless space of the inlet.

Swallowing the bites he took from her fingers, Paramon said quietly, “It’s so wild here.  We could never have imagined a place this wild, so uninhabited.”  He looked up to the sky and asked, “Leena.  Do you think I’m a fool?”  Behind him a heron rose, flapping off a muddy bank, his long legs tapping the water’s surface, then lifting, dripping and bobbing as he crossed above their boat.

Leena watched the heron disappear without answering.  She watched the way its body dipped and rose with each flap of wing.  Water sloshed at her knees and their bodies rocked in opposition to the lean of Paramon’s rowing.  Wanting and needing his ebullience, she said, “I’ve never thought you a fool.  Besides, haven’t we always been curious?”

After a few more bites he turned his mouth aside and said, “Now you eat.  You and the baby need to eat.”  He rowed slowly, looking around the rustling stalk walls they passed through. Heat shimmered in sickly green waves above the grass.  “It is the human obligation to better one’s condition, if possible.   Despite the risks.  I do believe that.  If this succeeds, Leena. . .what a feat!  To create a new community!”

Leena knew these arguments well, and they signified the return of Paramon’s enthusiasm.  She smiled at him, and struggled to get up to her seat.  Off balance, one hand holding the food, the other beneath her heavy belly, she was unable to lift herself, and sank back into the water on her knees, surprised.  Paramon shelved the oars and together they lifted her onto the seat, the boat jerking and threatening to toss them both.  They stilled themselves, laughing softly, although Leena felt a panic in Paramon’s grip as he lowered her to her seat.  They looked together down a side tributary as they passed it, and Paramon moved back into the center of the boat, and resumed rowing.

Sweat rolled down his face, from his temple to his chin.  Leena watched him for a moment, looked at the wet sheen on his face, and felt the relentless sun on the crown of her own head.  Suddenly, she was aware of the vulnerability of their bodies, the huge physical task before them.  Rather than make their philosophizing seem trite, it made it seem sublime.  She said, “The men who stop seeking are dead in mind and soul.  That is what you have always said.”

Paramon rowed silently, staring into the water, the oars creaking in the oarlocks.

Leena thought about the words, which she believed but hadn’t understood before, because she hadn’t known that seeking could be quite so risky, so enormous.  She did feel alive, utterly alive.  So it was true.  She smiled at Paramon when he looked up at her.

She said, cocking her head to one side, “You’ll let me know when it’s my turn to row.”

He laughed.  “I’d like to see that.  Why don’t you sleep after you eat?  I’ll wake you if anything marvelous swims along.”

Leena looked at the fish she held in one hand, but instead of eating, she closed her eyes a moment.  When she opened her eyes the boat was emerging into a wide expanse of flats and low, thick grasses.  Everywhere she looked, it was the same green.  The same fields of grasses sprung from water, fringed by the same tall reeds on every side.  The same reflections of sky, reed, grass on water everywhere.  She couldn’t differentiate any of it, what they passed through, or the next inlet they sought.  She couldn’t imagine that even Savar Leggith knew one inlet from another.  It was all water, all space, all sky to her.  She breathed deeply.

She looked down at the gleaming white fish wrapped in the deep green leaf, the beautiful colors there. Such colors together would make a fabric she had never seen.  The raised lines of the leaf mimicked the shadowed lines in the flesh.  She put a piece of fish in her mouth and after a moment said, “It tastes exquisite, Paramon.  My goodness, so sweet!  Why didn’t you tell me?”  She sucked the meat from her fingers hungrily, thinking of fabric, while the boat surged forward into a neck of water cinched tight with grasses.