She explains the word for me—a ship is a kind of boat, but larger and steadier than the one my people would make out of driftwood. Now House Ranravan is a dwelling, and a name for Ranra’s people—her descendants, and their lovers, and their friends, and their children.
I know this name.
It is a lurching, dizzying feeling; a coincidence, maybe. I could ask, but I’m wary of where the story will lead us—lead me. After a moment I school my features and continue my tale.
Rordan is a word that means the whole of the Bonded Shoal. The star made of ancestors, shallowly connected to the world of the living and nurtured by it. But the past is reachable, if one so desires. If one wants to talk to the ancestors, one has to descend centerward, travel down the bonds.
Among the living, this is rarely done. What reason is there to go so deep into the Shoal? The task of the living is to live. To work, to maintain the body, to share it so that more siltway bodies can be born. The living are simply an anchor for the Star of the Shoal, a safeguard so that it won’t diminish again. What purpose, what curiosity, would move a single one of us to descend into the Shoal of the dead?
Yet it is known to happen. The one who birthed me taught me to do this before they abandoned the body, if I needed to find them again. And so at night I lay down in the shallow pool in my cave, and tugged on the ancestor-bond through my two-syllable deepname.
It was quiet and silvery-gray in the ancestor Shoal, and my parent did not stir when I flickered to their side. They had a personshape in the water of that place, with eyes of pale silver that stared past me, and a mouth that spoke nothing. I wanted to talk to them, or simply be by their side, but I was afraid to linger.
My parent’s soul was bonded to others, I saw—people of their own generation, and the preceding one. I tugged on that vertical bond, and descended through the bonds of the dead.
There were so many bonds. I did not understand this geometry. More than one bond could be formed through a deepname. Old Song told me about it, but nobody taught me how. Yet I could not stay to figure it out. If I thought too much, I would find myself back in the pool in my cave, my residual gills stretched taut with the labor of breath.
No, I had to keep moving, and so I pulled myself down centerward, generation after generation. These people were unfamiliar to me. Their bonds were strange, and they looked translucent, leached of color, with little awareness of me—but the more I descended, the more I sensed that I was being watched, as if all of them watched me at once.
It was foreboding and dreary and I could not imagine moving to live here. This was what death was about, what we all wanted at the end of a life—to be free from the body and its labor, to continue in the ancestor Shoal. Why did it feel so constricting? I was frightened, and wanted to flicker back out and up to the living, all the way to Old Song. I hovered, motionless, by one of my great-great-ancestors, seventy generations deep.
Just then, a song began to ascend from deeper inwards below. A song I thought I recognized.
I am Stone, I told myself. I am strong. Strong enough to anchor the isles. Strong enough to anchor Old Song. I am Stone. I am a warrior.
So I moved deeper down, and in a few generations I began to see the red light.
The color was coming from inside a cluster of ancestors, all bonded together. Each of these ancestors had a translucent body, whitish, but formed around a red light that colored the edges of their arms in a pink glow. These ancestors moved around in the water, all looking at me.
We are Song and Stone, they sang, from before the Star of the Shoal came to this world and sank into this sea. We are the youngest of travelers, the last unalive generation.
We are the ones who saw and heard when the twelve stars were carried upon Bird’s burning tail.
We saw HIM and heard HIM calling to us and
We wanted to fall—
Into the embrace of Ladder’s hands.
But we were overruled.
I did not know back then who Ladder was, but the language was familiar from Old Song’s story. He: a man from elsewhere. A nameway.
I want to travel, I said. Not only to flicker, but in the body. I want to know this world of the other eleven stars that fell and were embraced by their keepers.
There was a disturbance in the Shoal.
If you want to know about Ladder, an ancestor sang, then you must attend to his summoning song.
We heard it. We hear it still.
If you attend to it, he will call you, like he called us—and you will travel to him.
The whole of the Shoal began to swirl. Above and below, souls streaked past me, fishlike, agitated, dissolving their bonds and darting away. I’d never thought such a thing possible, but I felt it as deep pain, agitation. Fear. In a moment, it was as if the whole Shoal had separated into its constituent souls. They were silver sea-minnows rushing this way and that, dizzying me. In that moment, I perceived a cluster of people still clumped in the water, unmoving. These were the red-glowing ancestors.
They did not seem fishlike. Neither did they separate.
They were bonded—not just to each other—I squinted, to see—they were held by the bonds that extended toward them. Not lovingly, or even companionably were they held—no, this was made to constrain them, and—I perceived this—to punish.
Just as the Shoal separated, these bonds too began to weaken, to wink in and out, and the ancestors of red began to struggle, throwing themselves against the constraint of these flaring and fizzling bonds that held them in place.
All this took only a moment, a frantic and terrible moment.
The Shoal flared, blinding me as it reformed.
The Shoal.
The Shoal was still.
All was as silent and unmoving as before.
No, more than before—the ancestors of red neither sang nor spoke. They still had bodies of people, motionless now, their eyes flat and staring past me.
