Listen to the Water | FULL SERIES | Wattys 2022 Shortlist | ✔

(15) Ande: A Warning

I join Taiki when I've finished both the story I was reading and the one next to it, for good measure. I'm not usually that petty anymore, but the way he tried to pull me away rubbed me the wrong way and made me all the more determined to keep reading. I understand his fears about the Sami, and even his sweeping hatred of them after so many Shalda tribes have been lost to surface Kels. But he was also the first to ever tell me the Ashianti don't fall into that category. I fail to see, then, why he has to block me or anyone else from their stories, too.

Or maybe I wasn't reading an Ashianti story. Sure. Fine. But if we're here looking for stories, the least I can do is appreciate the efforts of a city so single-minded, it's had actual millennia of different Sami people recording their history on its coral walls.

I wonder what might have happened if my people had done that somewhere. Written down what they saw when they first arrived on the islands, and recorded their beliefs over time. Maybe I'd have seen how devastating we were to the Kels, and been able to draw lines between that damage and their retaliation. Or maybe hiding that was the point of not writing things down. After all, our hand in the conflict never made it into our stories told from memory, either.

These walls, though, surpass anything my people could have made. All my people's legends, and their sister islands' legends, and their sister islands' sisters' legends would hardly fill a single band around this single outgrowth of coral, and our island histories span almost three and a half hundred years. With that perspective, it only takes one look to know without a shadow of doubt that no people, no matter how vast or rich in storytelling, could ever remember everything written on the walls of Rapal.

But Rapal could never have become what it is today through one people, either. I trail one hand over the swirls on the wall as I make my way towards Taiki, spotting differences in writing styles, inks, symbols, and the cement smoothing the wall. No one people could carry all these stories because no one people ever has. Rapal's history is a patchwork of many different cultures, all sewn together at the edges and building on what the ones before them left behind. The fact that none of them erased what came before them amazes me. They all left the buildings, legends, and writing of their predecessors intact, like one long, unspoken chain of agreement back to the eel-Kel days that something about this place is sacred.

And Taiki says the Sami have no respect for the dead.

I finally reach him at the top of the outgrowth, though I stall over the last few arm-spans just to read glimpses of the tantalizing stories passing by beneath my fingertips. I find Taiki moving systematically around the top of the outgrowth. His eyes are fixed on the wall, and he ducks living corals almost on instinct as he skims through the uppermost stories. The youngest ones, carved into dead coral so white, with ink so black, the two shock against one another. Taiki pulls his hands back to let a small eel go by. Curious fish nibble his shoulders and play biting games with the tips of his flyaway hair. He doesn't seem to notice.

I drift up beside him. "What are you looking for?"

He glances at me, and I repeat the question.

"The rumbling ocean," he signs. "It happened when the Seers cast the spell that sent the islanders to the islands. If they felt it out here, I think we'll find it somewhere."

My eyes skip around the vast bulk of the outgrowth of their own accord, then down its twelve-arm-span drop to the first of the built dens. This is one of a dozen great outgrowths around the city, and there are smaller ones between and on many of them. Searching all of those will take us moons if we're lucky.

I think Taiki sees my look. "It won't be far from the top. The Ashianti have been here twice as long as your people have been on the islands, and I think they did most of their writing when they first came to the city."