The map that led to you, p.1
The Map that Led to You, page 1
To all my fellow weird kids; I hope you find something special in these pages.
And to you, who charted a course without a map. The stars are watching.
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
The Prophecy
Prologue: To Live
Part One: Port
NEW SHETATOWN
The Birth
The Sea Dragon
The Bonding
A Piece of the Pie
Wishing on a Star
X Marks the Spot
THE WEIRD SISTER
Pirates Punished
Strange Dreams
The Mermaid and the Pirate Prince
Tally’s Tale
The First Storm
The Third Storm
The Prophecy, Revisited
ALL HALLOWS’ EVE
The Second Storm
Part Two: Starboard
The Republic of Sheta Island
FACT AND FICTION
The Pull
New Tides
The Queen Áine
Watercourses
The Seams of Things
THE JACARANDA TREES
A Whisper on the Wind
Of Sea, Of Stars
Star Quality
Do Not Catch Her, Do Not Try
La Liberté
The Nubian Brethren
NEW YEAR’S EVE
Leviathan, Awake
The Third Storm, Revisited
Part Three: Prow
THE DRAG QUEEN
Disembark
Diego the First
The River Mumma
FRIENDS WITH THE TREES
The Leeching
Caught
Blood and Water
The Unmaking
SOME CATTINESS
The Language of Dreams
A Faerie Tale
Fly the Rainbow
Epilogue
X
Acknowledgements
The Prophecy
Nigh is the time of the witch who burned,
Nigh is the time that stars will fall,
Nigh is the time of the mermaid’s son
Who’ll destroy his home to answer a call.
Nigh is the time of sixteen suns,
Nigh is the time of poison root,
Nigh is the time to find lost things,
For witch’s blood bears fertile fruit.
Prologue: To Live
The Seer from Persea was born powerful. She had entered the world with her eyes wide open, devouring each sight as though she’d been starved in the darkness.
Persea was her coven. Her mother smiled into her babe’s eyes in those bloody, tired moments, and gave thanks to Yaa, the great goddess of their land, which was known as Xaymaca.
“Yvane,” her mother whispered reverently. “You are Yaa blessed.” The baby gazed with precocious clarity. To be a Seer was a great gift and a heavy burden. It was understood that when she came of age with her sixteenth sun, she would see the great truths of Xaymaca. Her little sister, who will die at the end of this chapter, was not so gifted.
Not that Nubia ever accepted this. Where Yvane saw more than any one being could ever wish, Nubia sought more than any witch might have dared. Nubia would venture beyond her coven’s eastern grove and plunge into the depths of the great forest. She would lie down on the soft blanket of green, gaze at the stars, and the stars would gaze back. When Yvane would unfold nervously at Nubia’s side, lowering her back to the grass, Nubia’s eyes would light from brown to gold in wicked amusement and she would clutch at her sister’s arm to illicit a shriek of surprise. It is here that we find our Seer and her sister, the silvery light of the tenth moon pooling blue on their dark faces.
“Oh, great Seer of Persea, quite blind in the dark, quite unseeing of her sister’s tricks!”
“My skin prickles.” Yvane rubbed her arms.
“It is only natural. It is the Sankofa. And you are sensitive to the currents of the world.”
“I know.” Yvane followed her sister’s gaze, turning her eyes skywards. “It is strange, is it not? Every witch celebrates their own birthday but it is their sixteenth Sankofa that really matters.”
In Xaymaca the sun and moon would certainly wax and wane, but Time had a magic, had a voice, a soul of her own. The Sankofa was a point of consistency, though, always occurring on the first full moon after the late equinox. It was thought that despite distance or difference in name or language, on this night, witches everywhere raised their eyes to the heavens in reverence and so magic flared brightest in the world. On this night, witches who had celebrated their sixteenth sun that year would come into their full power.
When the River Mumma and Yaa, the goddess of the land, came together in what was known as the Great Bonding, a rainbow had arced crossed the sky. This happened in a time that predated memory. Together they had overcome the true darkness of chaos, drawing it out, out and away, into the depths of the sea. But what is taken must always be replaced, and so magic flowed back into the land until it was absorbed by its natural vessel, the witches whose coven was called Persea.
As the darkness left, some of their shadows remained – the fraying, blurry edges that mediate with the light. From these silvery diplomats, the Anansi spiders were born.
The Anansi spiders were large and shadow-coloured, their masses moving in clusters through the forest, spinning silk that could find truths, knowing how each thing connected to the next and the next and passing them from elder to youth. They had no names, for what need had they of such individualizing things?
Not like the faeries, who valued the opalescent glimmer of each distinct wing. The faeries had arrived not long after the spiders; the air created by the magic in the plants had formed their light, weightless figures with skin that glowed bronze and copper. Mmoatia was the only faerie queen that Yvane and Nubia had ever known. Where the spiders preferred the cool dark corners of the deep forest, the faeries preferred the rolling hills and lush valleys of the west of the island. The air was elderberry sharp; they were creatures formed for catching breezes, for drifting with thin currents. They avoided the forests and groves, could not understand the language of their slipstreams and told resentful tales of faeries whose wings had been shredded on sharp branches and thorns. They, led by their queen, Mmoatia, built wide, airy halls and chambers above Favour Falls, a waterfall as clear and sparkling as the eyes of Mmoatia herself.
“Are you nervous? About tonight?” Yvane asked her sister. The River Aphra, the watery source of the land’s magic, murmured nearby, laughing at the haste of youth. Tonight the veil was thin and magic coated the air.
“No,” came the typical response, and though Yvane could taste the lie, she chose to ignore it.
“You can be honest with me, Nubia.”
“I am. I am not nervous. I am just … frustrated.”
“Why?”
Nubia wriggled her shoulders. “It’s the … the noble sacrifice of it all. On your sixteenth Sankofa, you cease to be who you were before, become someone new. And you don’t decide. Yaa does.”
“That is not true.” Yvane frowned. “I am still who I was before my Sankofa.”
“But you always knew you would be the Seer. You were born more powerful than most. And even of you, that is not quite true. You are more worried, more burdened.”
“The burden of sight is one I am willing to bear for Persea, for my coven and land.”
Nubia snorted. “Well, I am happy as I am, thank you. I do not wish to change. I do not want a burden. I defy it. Not for Persea, not for Xaymaca would I give up a chance to live as I am.”
Nubia threw the words across the forest, skipping them like stones across the river.
And the river spoke back.
“Who you are will change, defiant child of Persea.”
The River Mumma sat before them. Her seaweed-coloured tail rippled idly. Had she been listening all along? An ancient and powerful mermaid, she was feared and revered. It was said that she guarded the river, protecting the source of the land’s magic, and showed herself only to those considered worthy. Her dark green hair was lost in the relative gloom of the forest, so like it in shade and texture. Her skin shone smooth and brown and her eyes, the blue-grey of a stormy sky, seemed to glow in the darkness.
Nubia glared back. She was, perhaps, the first living thing to dare to do so. “I know I will,” she countered, as though the ancient river mermaid had been sitting with them all evening. “I simply do not see the point in living my life for anyone else. It is my life. I want to live it and live it for me.”
The River Mumma’s eyes sparkled with amusement. She did not have Yvane’s proficiency for prophecy but she did, of course, know things. She was older than they could even comprehend.
Yvane regained her voice, though it trembled in awe, interrupting before her sister could say something else offensive. “You are worried. I felt the same before my sixteenth Sankofa. I feel the same tonight, with all the eyes of this world upon us. But tonight is more than just a party or some rite we are compelled by duty to perform. It is a celebration of who we are. Who you are.”
“I know who I am!” Nubia was indignant. “I am me! Nubia! I don’t need to be affirmed by anyone, not even Yaa.”
The River Mumma chuckled, snapping the witches’ heads towards her. “I like you, witchling. I’m sure Yaa does too. But some things are meant for you, Nubia. There are some wills that you cannot live in defiance of.”
Nubia shivered. How did the mermaid know her name? The river frothed and foamed and the water closed over the River Mumma’s head as though she’d never been there.
Yvane gazed at the place she had vanished for a few moments. The River Mumma was so rarely seen and yet she had chosen to present herself on the night of her sister’s sixteenth Sankofa. What did it mean? Two years after answering her own call, she knew that to see was not always to know. But she had the gift of sight and she could not shy away from it. It was as the River Mumma had said to Nubia: she could not always live in defiance.
And now, from the depths of the forest, she could hear the faint beginnings of music. A wild, pulsing drumbeat, both unearthly and entirely of the earth, as though the land itself had begun to dance. But even as Nubia stiffened, ears pricked towards the sound, Yvane the Seer heard something else.
A familiar whispering. A song that only she could hear.
A prophecy.
Turning from the river, Yvane trod lightly up the bank towards the watery bower where the willow trees dipped their heads in silent prayer.
Yvane pressed her hand to the bark of a willow tree and felt the familiar light-headedness that spread in a tingling throughout her body, until she was so thin and glittering that she could become part of the tree, could dissolve into bark and stem and root. What she saw sent her careering back into her body, her breath catching in her throat.
Fractured pieces of future, some vague, others certain, but the whole of it a puncture through her heart.
*
Nubia would think often about Yvane’s face that evening. The press of her cheek against her neck as she had emerged from the willow bower, a fresh prophecy bubbling like blisters on her lips.
The Sankofa had called them deeper into the forest and Nubia remembered the feeling of the tug, the musical cry of the call as she was swept up and lost.
The coven had assembled, hundreds of witches dancing and singing and drinking and eating – all eyes trained on her, the sister of the Seer, waiting for her to take that first step on the path laid out before her—
No!
Her body surged in response to the music and magic around her but even though it was anathema to everything she knew, she stopped dancing. She fought the pulls and tugs, her body longing to twist and arc but she fought it still, jerking until she came to a painful standstill. Something was building in the air around her, a gathering pressure, a storm about to break. Nubia’s bones shook, her teeth grinding as though her jaw might splinter, her feet bore into the cool moist grass beneath her.
And then a release, clear and dazzling, as though the twinkling of the stars had been given a voice. Hello, Defiant One.
The call she had been waiting for, primed for all her life. The voice of Yaa, soft and sweet and immovably demanding an answer. Her body reached towards the presence of her goddess, and she fought it, even as she began to suspect that it was a fight she had lost long ago. All around Nubia, bodies continued to move and blur but all was mute and grey. Because the stars were twinkling at her. Winking and calling and laughing until her No! became the song that beckoned to her from far away.
And the newly named Nubia of Defiance had no choice but to open her heart, and answer Yaa’s call.
Fate claimed her as it claims us all. Afterwards, when Yvane shared her prophecy and her suspicions about the witch that would burn, Nubia was almost deaf to her speculation. Even when the faeries and spiders gathered to discuss, coven, court and cluster, murmuring of the River Mumma’s dangerous future son, of what it all might mean, the call of her future was loud in her ears, drowning out all other sound. While part of her clung to her old defiance, another part of her, the part of her that was bright and permeable, had already reached into the sky and answered.
*
Two suns passed and Nubia could resist no longer. She could not deny what was written in her stars.
Yvane wrung her hands, swollen with worry. “You must not go!”
Nubia grasped them in her own. “You will rub them raw,” she chastised gently. “I will miss you terribly. But the stars, they call me, Yvane. I hear their song in the mortal world and I must answer.”
“Yaa named you Nubia of Defiance! So defy this!”
“I can’t defy this any more than you can see a way to be free of the responsibility of your sight. We are Persean witches. With our many blessings come burdens. You taught me that. And our people do not fear goodbyes.”
“I fear that world, Nubia. It is far away and different. I hear whispers of it from the trees. It is as though everything that exists beyond the material there is … dying. Magic is not wanted there, Xaymacans are not wanted there. I think of my prophecy and worry that you will never be by my side again.”
*
Later, as Nubia burned, she played those words over and over in her head. She was unsure, as the first of the flames licked her feet, how she could have avoided this moment. Her cry of pain was a whisper as the smoke scratched at her throat. She was weakened, vulnerable after the hours she had bled and sweated to bring her baby into the world. She thought of the sweet cherubim face she had known only for a day and a half before they had taken him from her arms. Pain was pushing at her consciousness; distantly she was aware that she was screaming but she was far away from her body now, as gentle hands stroked her brow and a musical voice intoned, Hello, Defiant One.
The rage that burned in Nubia’s chest cooled the fire, now encasing her body, to inconsequentiality. Her fury at the injustice of this dance that she had been led down, of this end, was hot and deadly, a supernova exploding to swallow the world around her. She would not go grateful or obsequious. She would not die thanking Yaa for whatever any of it meant – for what did it matter anyway? She would not see it. She would be gone and her son would never know his mother. She was Nubia of Defiance, and she would not be noble.
Where she burned and became ash, the earth was fertilized by her flesh and bones and a tree of blistering, blazing danger shot up in her wake.
The “NO!” Nubia of Defiance sent out into the ether with her dying breath tore through the skies with such force that it rattled the stars themselves.
And slowly, falteringly, one star in particular – one that had watched too closely and twinkled too bright – began to fall.
Part one Port
NEW SHETATOWN
Someone, somewhere, far away
is calling out your name.
You are one of ours, they say,
Your eyes are so familiar.
Your blood is burning bright.
You know the language of the trees,
You hear them in the night.
Inexact but with intent,
You know the song we sing,
Hear Her voice, find your place,
Brown girl in the ring
There’s a brown girl in the ring
Tralalala
There’s a brown girl in the ring
Tralalalalala
Brown girl in the ring
Tralalala
She looks like the sugar in the plum
Many things had to begin long before your story started. Without all that went before, you might have been frozen in the prologue of your existence or, perhaps, never past act two.
You always have had a sense of beginnings being significant, but despite that, you have never really liked birthdays, and today is no different. Celebrating the day of your birth is not an entirely comfortable occasion in your house given that it happens to coincide with the day your mother died. You don’t remember her, of course. Not as she was. She haunts your house now, an unacknowledged spectre, a flitting shadow of resentment, laughing at your father’s jokes and knocking over your photos. She brought you into the world, the first girl in your dad’s family – “And you thanked her for it by killing her. Some feminist you are!”
That’s the joke your dad, Five, often makes.
According to him, he has a “famously dark sense of humour”.
Five is the cartographer of New Shetatown, Sheta Island’s small, solitary port town. The map-making company is a family business and unsurprisingly successful, given that naval paraphernalia, marine research and navigation are what the island is best known for. The monopoly over what is technically a successful industry in the island’s capital has given him, in your opinion, a rather inflated sense of self-importance. That and the repeated refrain “dark sense of humour” often feel like an excuse for the hurt he throws at you, casual and small, dropped like pennies for you to pick up.
