by Melantha
To Cities and Provinces Treatises
East of Moraithe, across a short stretch of ocean, lies one of the largest land masses in Carador. A land with many names and none, little is known of it beyond its coast. Near the southern tip, where ships make their way on route to Shavay, great sand beaches stretch as far as the eye can see. But to the north, the coast grows rocky and battered, and hidden bays nestle behind small, stone islands where strange formations give the impression of watchers looking out over the waves.
Most of these bays are unnamed. But on rare maps, one of them is marked. Saeriat Bay, it is called, and if anything more is said, it will be only a minor note warning ships to stay clear.
What lies in this little bay? Why should ships beware? For many years all has been hidden in the mists of secrecy. But a year ago a person who knows the secret came forth into our world, and from him we have learned something not only about Carador, but perhaps about human nature as well.
Here is the story he told, word for word, as he spoke it to me.
Ever since things began to go bad in Masalla, many centuries ago, people have been leaving. Those who fled gave us our provinces, for they settled in Moraithe, and the Old World, and the New. But others went elsewhere, smaller groups, and colonies were born. They’re everywhere, actually, known to each other but not to outsiders. It’s like a world, a gathering of provinces, hidden among the ones most of us know. I could list a hundred such colonies right now, if I wished. I’ve been to as many, trading in our small ships. But none that I’ve visited are so strange as Saeriat Bay. My home.
I was born forty-one years ago. When I emerged from my mother, I was thrown bodily into the sea. I’ve seen the ritual performed twenty or thirty times since then. The father grasps the child and throws them as far as he can, offering the babe to the sea. And then we watch. Most do not re-emerge. A few are found a day or two later, white and bloated, washed upon the beach. But some, a rare few, are tossed by the waters and thrown back to the beach by the waves. One in ten, perhaps, are given back to us to live. I was such a one.
I want to tell you now that I’m torn between cultures, Melantha. What was and what is . . . sometimes I don’t know what’s right. The ritual of the Babe and the Sea is a terrible one. From the perspective of your culture, I can see that now. But for us, it served a purpose. The cliffs of Saeriat Bay possess eighteen caves large enough to hold a person. Each is a home, and each belongs to a single dweller. There are never more of us, you see. Only eighteen. And sometimes less. If all our babes survived, there would be no place for living, you see?
As I grew up, first with my mother and then on my own, in my own dwelling, I learned the ways of Saeriat Bay. I learned of the ocean, and how to fish, and how to crawl among the rocks and find soft things clinging below the waves. Some are meant to eat, and some hold venom or a sharp sting. I learned quickly which to take.
I learned to speak to the sea-fae that emerged, during storms or late at night, from the waves. We called them ‘kulun’, ‘sael’, and ‘jitaen’. They are not creatures I have seen in the bestiaries of your libraries. These three creatures are our bridge between the mortal life and the essence of the world, the "Cadoeren". You could call Cadoeren a god, but it is not so in the way of your gods. Your deities possess personality, thought, intent. They are like people. Cadoeren is not, for Cadoeren is the sea, the breath, the bubbles trailing behind a fleeing fish, the venom in a soft thing’s sting.
I learned of Cadoeren, and learned to stack rocks in odd, precariously balanced piles, upon the beach in honor of the great god. I learned how to feel Cadoeren within myself, and stare at the sky and make clouds fade or grow with my gaze.
When I was thirteen, a girl-child was born who would make our number nineteen. They threw her out to the sea, and a few moments later she was washed up again. The people rushed to her, emptied her lungs of water, and revived her.
Since I was youngest, it was decided that I would do battle with her for the right to live in Saeriat Bay. She grew to the age of four before she was ready to leave her mother. At seventeen, I was to do battle with a four-year old girl for the right to live.
We were taken to the rocks where the thin, striped sharks darted among schools of fish. Each of us was stood up upon a pinnacle, and with stone knives cuts were traced along our backs and our bellies. Then the men drew back on their bows. I remember looking over and seeing her crying.
With a prayer we were thrown backward into the water, and I fell through the waves, seeing fish dart away as the red cloud of my blood streamed above me.
I pulled my way to the surface and tilted my head back the sky. I could see the bows pointed at me. I knew that I was to lie still – if I moved at all the arrows would come. Either the sharks would tear my flesh to feed the sea, or the waves would wash me to shore.
I stared at the clouds, and gently willed the sharks away from me. I emerged, an hour later, upon the beach. The girl did not. I remember being grateful for my life, but something else had stirred there, as well, for I found myself wishing that she had had more time to watch the clouds and learn to make them come and go. The seed had been planted in me that would, eventually, cause me to leave Saeriat Bay.
As I grew, I began to learn the inner, secret ways of understanding Cadoeren. I was taught that humans lived all over the lands, and sailed in huge ships upon the sea, and that most humans were ignorant of life, of Cadoeren, of the nature of balance in the world. Pain and pleasure were mutual, I learned, and one was not to be sought more than the other. Life and death were part of a natural cycle of which we saw only a tiny part. The importance of life was experience, and tasting my food, feeling my thirst, allowing the world to carry me where it would. We had no medicines, and no magic but our will. Disease was not to be fought against. We did not hide from the rain or the lightning as you do here. We fished upon the waves if the weather was good, and fished upon the waves if the waters threatened to tear our ships apart. It may sound odd to you, but I know that all things, even stones and the wind, are alive, and because we moved with, instead of against, the elements, the sea would not kill us. Sometimes we would be battered, sometimes we would fall ill. But the forces of nature, of Maya, if you will, did not often slay us.
I learned the history of Saeriat Bay, that a potent mage had emerged in Masalla, and had gained more understanding than any of his peers. He had left with a group of people, and had found Saeriat Bay, then died only a few days later. Ajanaas, called the Founder of Saeriat Bay, tried to carry on the mage’s teachings, and during long meditations upon the beach he learned of Cadoeren, and came to understand how we, the people of Saeriat Bay, were the Chosen of the true god, and how one day we would transcend the physical body, and all of Carador would be moved by our will.
At the age of twenty-four years I was tested to see if I would be fit to be a priest of Cadoeren. We light no fires at Saeriat Bay but for this ritual, and the flames, as they mesmerized me with their strange, liquid dance, summoned forth three creatures from the depths – a representative of each of the three sea-fae we knew. Dark and glistening, strangely beautiful, they emerged, and drew me into the shallows. I was drawn into the black waters, and they moved about me, and I felt strange feelings upon my flesh. A moment later, choking, bleeding, I was thrown from the waves onto the sand. It was the first time I wept, for somehow they had violated me in a deep and terrible way that I could not explain. It was as if they had tasted my very soul. I had not been found to be suitable, and would know no more of the secrets of the fae than most of my other people – it was for us only to sit upon the rocks and throw them fish at night, and speak to them of the wind and the secret places beneath the waves, of wrecks and ancient, submerged cities. Their true secrets would forever be denied me.
I became a trader, for I loved the sea, and learned to read the shapes of waves to take me from one isle to another. We traded with other colonies who had left civilization to make their own, and sometimes with fae, and sometimes with tribes who knew not the Caradorian tongue.
No creature, I soon learned, is so diverse as the human creature.
I learned, too, of your lands, Melantha. Of the great provinces, who thought themselves rulers of the world. And I began to wonder.
You may have guessed, already, that few of us grow old. At forty years of age, I was the eldest among us. I watched as the very ritual I had been a part of when I was young, when I had battled the girl, was enacted between two young boys. When they both emerged on shore, it was a new ritual that would take place. A battle between the two of them and myself, the eldest. The priests would envenom us with the spine of a certain soft creature that clung to the stones. They were young, and by then I was able to change the flight of a bird with my thoughts, and bring fish to my nets with a glance. I knew the boys would die. So I left, sailing off in my small ship, the first of our kind to do so in the memory of my people. And now I find myself here, trying to learn new ways that conceive of life as precious, as the gods as people, as pain as bad and pleasure as good. I’ve lost much of myself, and the birds do not fly so readily to my whim. But I have learned, as well, that there are ways beyond those of Saeriat Bay, and that perhaps our beliefs are just that, and not the truths I had earlier supposed. Perhaps I will never fit in among your people, but I shall try, and shall, perhaps, help others to understand that the human condition is one of such incredible diversity that the normal acts of one culture can be the abhorrent atrocities of another.
He begged off after that, walking off down a dark and windy roadway on a night not so distant in time. I remember him as dark-haired, obviously Masallan of blood, with much-scarred flesh and haunted eyes.
If anything more will ever be learned of Saeriat Bay, it will probably not be for a long time to come.
To Cities and Provinces Treatises