The Vapours of Caldera
by David Brookes
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Table of Contents parts 1, 2, 3 The Spirits of Caldera |
part 1
Leanna sat on the stone with her legs in the water, sewing. Beside her were the wetsuits she had finished: sixteen of them and counting. She had to admit to being overworked, but there was nothing for it; tomorrow was the first day of April and soon would come the Vapours. After that, the deadly dry period. The suits were necessary.
She pricked her finger with the stone needle, drawing a bead of glistening orange blood. The needle broke, and she cursed. Somebody would eventually have to go into the Reach to replace that needle, with all the risks that entailed.
Looking up, Leanna saw the sun disappear behind the Ridge. The village of Caldera was a mesh of long, crisscrossing shadows filling the circle of the steep Ridge. It was getting dark, and that meant time to give it up for the day. To keep going would only mean to break more needles.
She waded towards the centre of the village, singing. Over the years she’d grown fond of accompanying her songs with the splash of the warm water about her legs. The village elders scolded her for it and said that at twenty-one she should grow up and make less noise. At dusk, most of Caldera was praying.
The water was shallowest at the village centre, where Leanna and everybody else slept. There was less chance of drowning in the night there than at the edges of the village, where the water was too deep to stand up in. In the centre, where the submerged stone ground rose to a curved mound, the village was inhabitable.
Through the rising mist Leanna walked, swinging her pack of newly-sewn wetsuits. At the village boundary she bumped into Paul, who was waiting where he usually did. Paul’s job as the records keeper hadn’t the importance of the seamstress; whose life ever depended on well-organised scrolls? He got off work well before sundown.
‘Lea,’ he said eagerly, grinning from ear to ear. He was fifteen, six years her junior. As always, his features reminded her of Duncan.
‘Hello, Paul. Here, hold these.’ She bundled the wetsuits into his waiting arms and kissed him hello.
‘You smell good,’ he said. Mischief spread across his features.
‘I’ve been near the Ridge. The Vapours are beginning to rise.’
‘Ah. So you smell of the dead.’
‘The lesser spirits haven’t appeared yet,’ she reminded him. She knew how much Paul liked her, but sometimes his boyish eagerness made her feel tired.
He beckoned for her to link arms with him, even as he struggled with his unwieldy load. Leanna did so, if only to alleviate the air of awkwardness around him. Paul did not like talk of the lesser spirits. Anything to do with the Vapours made him uneasy.
It didn’t help that he had the dry condition, an ailment that made his pale skin dry out even in the dense mist unique to within the circular boundary of the Ridge. Nobody in Caldera could survive beyond the Ridge, but Paul could barely live within it, and the superstitious notions of the elders didn’t make him feel any better.
It was then that Margaret, the bottlemaker’s apprentice, splashed up to them both with her frizzy hair flapping wetly behind her, yelling.
‘Lea! Lea!’
Margaret practically fell into the water trying to grab her. She caught her long toes painfully against a submerged stone, shrieked, and grabbed Leanna’s arms with slippery hands.
‘Lea! You’d better get to the eastern Ridge. The hunters have come back, and...’ She hesitated only to pant.
Leanna gripped Margaret’s wrists tightly, forgetting all about Paul, the wetsuits, and poor Duncan. ‘What is it, Maggie?’
‘It’s your father!’
* * *
All the Calderans were strong swimmers. This was something the elders told the villagers right from the day they were born, woven into the stories of their people.
‘All Calderans are strong swimmers, the strongest there are. That is why the Great Spirits chose to put us on land completely covered by water, instead of in the sterile wilderness beyond the Ridge. Ege Ven gave us our small eyes and second eyelids, to protect us from the sulphurous mists and the harsh minerals in the water. Staten gave us our long fingers and long toes, so that we can travel fast in pooled water. Mesmerana gave us our skin, smooth as her ice and yet with open pores to drink in the water from the air. Of all the realms in all the worlds, there are none more suited to swimming than Calderans.’
Leanna had heard the stories a thousand times and knew them well. Her mother Annette, as the chief, had a duty to the village’s babes to sing the praises of all the Greater Spirits and never stopped telling the stories. But Leanna also knew this because, as seamstress, she had to know the peculiarities of the body better than anyone and had studied all her short life.
She swam powerfully, confidently. Arm over arm she went, breathing in the mist above the water between drives, her blonde hair streaking behind her on the choppy water.
So close to the Ridge, the solid ground was nearly half a mile beneath her. The abundant salt and chlorine in the water helped keep her afloat, but even Canderans drowned from exhaustion in the deep perimeter.
Eventually she reached the stone Ridge, which curved steeply out of the water like a huge black wave. Leanna took hold of the slimy rock gratefully, feeling the ache in her limbs. Waiting only long enough to catch her breath, she then pulled herself quickly onto dry land and began to climb.
The wetsuit she wore had not been made for her. She had sewn it for Cesus, the fat cook, and it was loose on her slender frame and chafed like the devil. But she hadn’t the time to pick one that was a good fit, and only a fool entered the Reach beyond the Ridge without a wetsuit.
She climbed with her hands, quickly finding the holes cut into the dense stone by her ancestors. Her bare feet soon became sore, being unused to the hardness of the dry rock. The oversized wetsuit hung from her like loose flesh, slowing her down, but eventually she made it to the top.
The retrieval party was already there, getting ready to help the hunters descend to safety.
‘Where is he?’ she said, pushing past the other weary hunters, searching with frantic eyes for her father’s face.
She saw him, and their eyes met. He fell to his knees, greeting her, and wrenched the hood of his wetsuit from his face. His thicket of blond hair was revealed, along with a deep gash running from the top of his head down to his right eye.
‘Dad!’ she cried, and embraced him.
‘We’ve got to get him back into the water, girl,’ one of the other hunters said urgently. He was trying to pull up her father’s hood, to protect him from the dry air outside the village.
‘What happened to him? What did you let him do?’
‘You know what Jason is like, Lea,’ snapped Matthew, one of their oldest hunters. ‘Stubborn old eel. He leapt down a crevasse after a running-bird and nearly cut himself to ribbons against the ragged stone. He tore his suit, all up the side, see?’
‘It was a big one...’ her father murmured, now being carried down the steep inner slope of the Ridge. ‘A female... I got it with the sling from twenty metres.’
‘It was more like ten,’ Matthew countered, smiling, ‘but he got it.’
When he was in the thick mists that rose from the water, Jason seemed to perk up a little. He breathed deeply and his strong muscles tensed beneath his white skin. His wide pores opened like gasping mouths.
‘Dry,’ he whispered hoarsely. ‘Let me—’
They swung him by his arms and legs the last thirty feet. Jason turned the fall into a dive halfway down and disappeared into the water with only a discreet plop. Five seconds later he was back at the surface, grinning and gulping, smoothing back his hair with his big hunter’s hands.
‘Ah! So much better!’
Both relief and unconquerable fury filled Leanna up from her stomach. Before she could restrain herself, she was pelting her father with gravel from thirty feet up.
‘You idiot! You could have been killed! And you ripped your suit again. Who do you think is going to have to fix that?’
Jason only laughed, tired but with good nature, and soon Leanna was sobbing with relief as she climbed down to meet him. She loved her mulish father with all her heart and was overjoyed at his return, but both of them knew well that he had just narrowly escaped death, and that soon he would have to go again into the Reach.
* * *
That night she and Paul lay beside one another. There were only three stone buildings in the centre of the village, small unsteady things built from the rock that occasionally fell from the top of the Ridge. The villagers slept together in the open, in the triangular space between the Hall, the Shelter, and the Storehouse. The water was shallow enough to lie down there. The seamstress’ rubber quilts tied each sleeper down so that they didn’t turn over and drown.
The elders led the prayers, first to Solus, who kept the water warm; then to Precipicia, who brought fresh water in the form of rain from beyond the Reach; and to Staten, the Great Spirit of collected water, for breaking up the immense salt crystals in the deep perimeter to salinise the village.
When the prayers drifted silently into the mist and were replaced by the sounds of sleeping, Paul silently placed himself over Leanna. He fumbled with her, she helped him, and with as few gasps as possible they completed the act in the humid air, her back and his arms in the warm water, her hair splayed like the rays of the sleeping sun.
Leanna and Paul were still lying beside one another, waiting for their hearts to quieten, when they saw the first Vapours. From the deep perimeter around the village, the mist that rose from the water thickened into dense streamers of glistening fog.
‘Already,’ Leanna whispered, feeling a tightness in her chest.
Paul covered her with the sheet and hooked the corners to the fastenings under the water. ‘It’s okay. It happens every year, right? It’s nothing to be afraid of.’
Not for you, she thought, staring up at the stars; and that was when the earthquake hit.
They were used to quakes this time of year. They happened regularly but with varying frequency, impossible to predict. It was only a low one, but it made the warm water jump up and down, and woke everybody up. There were a few shouts of surprise, but already the earthquake had passed beneath them like a wave and was gone.
* * *
The following week, she worked like a girl possessed. The Vapours were always followed by the dry season, and that meant that everybody in the village needed their wetsuit repaired or adjusted. Some she had to make from scratch, like Jason’s tattered garment, and that took time.
At the bottom of the deep perimeter, where the water was dark and gritty with sediment, great crystals shone with werelight that filtered down from the surface. Most were salt growths, grey crystalline formations that crumbled and dissolved between the fingers. Others were more valuable, such as the chlorine deposits that kept the water clean. It also seemed to help produce the translucent gel that clung to the lower crags of the Ridge.
Leanna scraped this sludge into a waterproofed skin with her fingers, being careful not to lose any in the water. Once she had enough for a new wetsuit, she pulled the skin’s drawstring tight and swam the many meters back to the shallower village.
It was there, on her rock, that she continued to work. The sludge she stretched and held above the thickest mists, then collected and kneaded, then stretched again. In the sulphurous fumes it jellified, solidified, became rubbery. She wet it, stretched it, wet it, until it was flat and workable. Her muscles ached. She worked with singular dedication.
As the only seamstress, a job passed down to her by her mother’s sister, she had one of the greatest responsibilities in the village. Only the hunters were so valued, because the warm and sulphurous water could not sustain fish bigger than a little finger; it was the hunters alone who braved the dry wastes of the Reach beyond the Ridge for running-birds and lizards. But without the skills of the seamstress, there would be no wetsuits, and without the wetsuits the dry season — when there were no humid mists drifting up from the evaporating water — would prove terminal to many of the villagers.
She sewed, stitched, measured, cut. The waterproof fabric was tough to work with. She would accidentally sew a sleeve shut and have to unpick the coarse threads made of woven hair, much of it from her own blonde head. She would make an uneven hem and have to start again. It was not easy labour and she only had the grace of Solus, the Great Spirit in the Sun, to give her light to work by. But in November, it got dark early.
For weeks she worked, and every night the Vapours became thicker. The tremors under her feet grew stronger. It seemed that they were getting worse, lasting longer. There were new cracks running up the wall of the Storehouse.
‘But you say that every year,’ said Paul, who helped her on the day of rest, when Leanna was the only one still working.
‘Oh, leave me alone, then,’ she snapped. ‘Can’t you see I’m busy?’
The responsibility. The pressure. Some nights she thought she would go blind with stress, but it was only the Vapours, becoming impenetrable fog over the deep perimeter.
It was the last day of the month that she saw the first of the lesser spirits.
* * *
She saw an old woman. The woman had died of old age, but perhaps before Leanna’s time, because Leanna didn’t recognise her.
Leanna bowed out of respect, then tried to strike up a conversation. It was the most fervent wish of every villager to speak with a lesser spirit, but the spirits in the Vapours were often reluctant to converse. Leanna’s mother said it took much effort for them to remember the words of the living. There were no words or names in the Vapours, which were only a lens through which to view the world of the spirits.
‘Who were you?’ Leanna asked the vague form that drifted between layers of steam. ‘Is there anybody you would like me to bring to you?’
Copyright © 2019 by David Brookes
