Night Tide
“Old man Solyom said he heard his wife’s voice calling his name last night.”
Zigana didn’t turn her gaze from the vast expanse of sea before them as her father, Odon, spoke around the stem of his unlit pipe. They stood together, buffeted by the wind rolling off the water. Morning sunlight sparkled on the wave tips as the gulls flapping above screamed challenges to each other.
“A voice speaking? All I heard was the strange cry.” She had awakened to a sound the night before, an eerie dirge no human throat could ever create and none she’d heard from any sea creature.
She had crept down the stairs from her tiny attic bedroom to discover Odon standing at the window by the door. The waning moon cast no light through the clear panes. He stood silhouetted by the last embers of the dying fire in the hearth. Even in the dark, she sensed his worry. The dirge was a cold water splash against her spine when it came again, seeping into the walls and through the cracks under the door.
“Do you hear it?” Odon asked in a whisper, and Zigana suspected he didn’t keep his voice low just out of respect for her mother sleeping in the next room.
“Aye,” she whispered back and stood just behind him to peek out the window into the night. In the distance, a spectral green shimmer edged the horizon where the shoreline lay hidden behind a barrier of sand hillocks and salt grass. “What is it?”
“That which doesn’t belong here.”
Even now, under a bright morning sun and a shoreline that looked the same as it had every day of her life, she shivered at the memory of his answer.
Odon chewed vigorously on the pipe stem, his frown carving the lines in his face a little deeper. “Makes you wonder if anyone else heard the sound or a woman’s voice.”
Zigana mimicked his frown and bent to bury her hand in the wet sand. Seawater flowed over her knuckles, summer-warm and full of secrets. The runnels told their tales to her in a hum through her veins and sometimes as a flash of images in her mind. Something had swum these shallows last night before returning to the deep. Something that scared away the usual predators.
She squinted up at her father. “Can you feel it? The wrongness?”
He squatted next to her, gliding his hands through the glass-thin slide of water. “Aye. Like tasting poison in a sweet cake.”
She found the comparison apt. The sea had its dangers. Every sailor, fisherman, and any who lived on the coast knew it and accepted it. Howling storms and creatures that could swallow a man whole—if he was lucky enough not be torn apart first. These were part of everyday life, and there wasn’t a family in their village who hadn’t lost someone to the Gray, including her. Still, this was different, an otherness lingering in the tide.
Odon stood, dried his hands on his trousers and strolled back to the two draft horses waiting placidly on the beach. Zigana followed him, the world setting itself to rights when her gaze landed on her mare Gitta.
Gitta was a monster herself, at least to those used to fast, long-legged mounts. Built solid as an ox with hooves the size of dinner plates, the horse stood seventeen hands high at the withers with shoulders broad and thick as a barn door and hindquarters rippling with muscle. Zigana still had to take a running leap to mount her bareback without the aid of a stool or trace. Gitta’s offspring, a mare named Voreg, stood next to her, equally as massive. Their manes fluttered in the wind, and they ignored the screaming gulls above them as if they were no more than pesky sand gnats.
Zigana patted Gitta’s neck and checked the knotting on her baskets. Odon did the same to Voreg’s load and gave a quick jerk of his head toward the ensemble waiting farther back on the shore—men and women standing next to horses like Gitta and Voreg. ‘What do you think?” he said. “Safe to trawl?”
She turned back to the sea. Odon asked her that question every day during shrimping season. With only a few exceptions, she said yes. Today, she almost said no. The waters cascading over her hand assured her nothing swam beneath the waves that wasn’t supposed to be there, but the sense of strangeness remained. She could almost taste it on her tongue, bitter and thick.
“Safe enough,” she replied. “ Whatever sang its song last night is gone. For now.”
Odon motioned to the waiting shrimpers behind them. The creak of cart wheels rolling over wet sand rose above the surf’s steady rush as the horses pulled the carts toward the water. In no time, Zigana and the others had unhitched the carts, set up the boards and attached the nets to their patiently waiting mounts.
Gitta ruffled Zigana’s damp hair with a quick burst of air from her wide nostrils as if to encourage her mistress to hurry it along. Zigana used the trace to mount and swung a leg over the mare’s broad back to seat herself in the wooden saddle. She adjusted the baskets tied behind her on either side of the saddle and whistled sharply. The mare padded steadily into the rolling surf, shallow breakers foaming over the feathers of her lower legs as she followed Odon and Voreg, shrimp net dragging behind her.
The other trawlers joined them, a dozen fanning out to travel parallel to the shore, their horses harvesting shrimp from the sea instead of wheat from the fields. Zigana settled into the saddle, her body rocking to Gitta’s slow rhythm as the mare navigated her way through the surf, occasionally dipping her nose into the water. She tossed her head, collar thumping against her chest as she blew spray out of her nostrils.
They had done this together almost yearly since Zigana was fourteen and Gitta a three-year old filly. Even when the sky hung overcast and the waters were cold and foggy, Zigana loved trawling. Loved the time spent with the tide purling up to Gitta’s belly and sliding between Zigana’s toes. The briny smell of the Gray, the shriek of gulls, and the ceaseless salt wind that rolled off the water as they dragged the net; these things, without exception, soothed her soul, made her happy, brought solace in her greatest grief. Until now.
The water carried memory. It always did. Like Odon, Zigana had always sensed the life of the Gray beyond that of sight or smell. Some might call it the second sight, but it wasn’t. She didn’t see the future or read prophecy in the sea. It was more of a feeling, as if the Gray chose to occasionally give up its secrets to her and fill her mind with hints of what swam beneath the waves. Most of the time, she could predict a coming storm, but any experienced sailor could do that, as could old Ambrus when his knees swelled so badly, he could hardly walk. Unlike her and Odon, they couldn’t tell if the waters were safe to enter or if one of the big predator fish had chosen to visit the shallows in search of prey different from its usual fare.
Most often the shrimpers trawled in water too shallow for fish large enough to attack a horse, but there were exceptions, and none took lightly the sight of a dorsal fin slicing through the waves as it patrolled back and forth near the shore. During those times, when Zigana dipped her hand in the Gray, she caught flashes of watery darkness and blood, the dull ivory of teeth like saw blades or mouths filled with Nature’s equivalent of sewing needles. They didn’t trawl then, and the villagers had come to depend on both her and Odon for their “water-sight” as they’d come to call it.
This morning the Gray hadn’t felt unsafe, but it had felt fouled somehow. The waves flowing over her hands were no different in texture or temperature than the day before, but Zigana couldn’t shake the sensation of a sliminess and wiped her fingers on her skirts over and over in a bid to rid them of the feeling. Even now, riding an untroubled Gitta, she hiked her knees higher up the mare’s sides to avoid dragging her feet through the surf.
They finished their first trawl and plodded back to shore to give the horses a rest and empty the nets of their catch. Zigana dumped the contents into her bucket and sorted through the heap of shrimp, crab and small fish, tossing the last two back into the foaming surf where a flock of gulls waited to catch an easy meal. The gossip around her lacked its usual lightheartedness, and she listened closely while the other trawlers sieved their hauls and talked of old man Solyom.
“He hasn’t been right since Trezka died.”
“Why should he be? They knew each other as children and married when they weren’t much older than that.”
“But hearing her voice? Maybe she’s haunting him.”
