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

(18) Taiki: Words on the Walls

Sar was right: the eel-Kel maps in Roshaska's city core use solar directions. That shatters several assumptions I always had about the eel-Kels, and I'm not sure what to do about it. If they used solar angles for things like navigation, it means one of two things: either they spent a lot more time at the surface than anyone would assume given the depth of their city, or they, like Sar and Casin and most other shark-Kels, had a directional sense.

That's not in any of my people's stories. Direction senses are a shark thing, and while there are Shalda sharks, the eel-Kels weren't among them. Then again, there are no eel-Kels around anymore, so it's not like we can ask them what senses they did or didn't have.

For that, we have to rely on their writing, and no Shalda-Kel I know has ever actually read anything written by the eel Kels. My people rely on spoken or signed stories. Some of the signed ones have been around for so long and been told so many times that they've become like dances, each sign stylized and elaborated until the whole thing is as much a visual spectacle as a narrative one. The Kels who became the island people were particularly known for that. And you know something is deeply embedded when they maintain it on the islands even after losing their memories of where they came from and who they were.

I've always known those stories were prone to embellishment. Some have gained details even over the course of my lifetime: I have clear memories of the hero in one story fighting with a spear when I was a child, but by the time I was old enough to tell it myself, it had changed to a sharpened Shalda clamshell. Other peoples I've met tell it with no weapon at all. I've known that many Kel peoples have these different versions of their stories, including the one about the prophecy of the island Kels. But it somehow never sank in that this kind of fluidity might also apply to our ancestors.

The eel Kels didn't tell stories the same way we do. Our storytelling style is something non-eel Shalda invented, after they took to the open ocean and found that knowledge was more durable there when spoken or signed. A block of stone can be destroyed far more easily than every knowledgeable individual in a vast clan that spans hundreds if not thousands of tribes. I've met Shalda who credit that, in part, for why the eel Kels collapsed. Their cities were destroyed, and their written knowledge was lost. I don't believe that—especially after hearing from Sar about how much survived those early destructions—but the main point remains.

The eel Kels wrote things down.

That means people who can read their writing have, in the end, a more direct link to them than my people do, and that extends even to eel-Kel Shalda like the ones who built Roshaska. There's something profoundly disorienting about realizing that. That Sar, an Ashianti Kel from the surface waters, might have a better handle on the inscriptions here than I do. Might know more about the eel Kels from them than I do. Even though my people have been coming here for hundreds of generations.

That discomfort is nearly enough to keep me from asking about it, like that will protect my illusion of knowledge I don't actually have. That's stupid, though, so I mentally brace myself and move up beside Sar. "Do the records in Rapal talk about the eel Kels having a directional sense?"

"No. But this isn't the first time I've seen them use solar directions, so I'm assuming at least some of them did." Sar pauses. "It would help explain how they spread everywhere so quickly."

They're watching me as they sign it, probably gauging my reaction. I'm not sure how to react, to be honest. Because they're right. The eel Kels did get everywhere—all over the ocean, splitting into dozens if not hundreds of distinct peoples and occupying every habitat known to Kels today. There are even whispers that the Seers are surviving ancestors of the eel Kels. That kind of spread requires a wide-ranging and very versatile people. The farthest-traveling Kels today are all Sami and Saru, and they all have directional senses.