*** *** He’d worn his best to the interview, and didn’t flinch as the dour and intimidating Cardinal-Guardian led him through a complex and shifting maze of questions. His father disowned him on the day that he left. His mother ironed his best shirt, cried silently and to herself, and pressed one-hundred lumineri into the palm of his hand. Stoicism and silence: that was the essence of life in Étl-Inland, far from the Iodine Archipelago, the Cardinal-Guardians, and the Initiatto they protected. And so, with Pápé and Mámi at his back, he walked from home, ignoring the bland inquisition on the faces of familiar strangers. He’d slept in hostels in Pô and in Dvora, and on the seaward edge of Dvora; he’d bought passage on a fisher-scamp for twenty lumineri. “Tell me your name, and show me your papers,” a Borderman demanded with ritual bluster, and more than a bit of honest belligerence. The fisher-scamp bobbed on indolent swells and waves at his back, and beyond it—far and farther away—the Corsic Mainland lined the horizon like something drawn. He didn’t look back. There was nothing for him to see anymore. “My name,” he’d said, forcing himself to speak calmly, and with as little of an Étl-Inland accent as he could manage, “is Franciského Merhalhéis.” The Borderman might have been of Nôrôtôs blood: he wore the same length of bone, the same anodyne skin, and the same hair in the color of corn-silk and the color of sand. His eyes, Franciského noticed, were brown: atypical of the Nôtôrôs and disturbing in the way they bored through Franciského’s own gaze. It felt—for a moment—as if the blustery Borderman could look directly through forehead and read lubber-bumpkin fear written across the back of his brain. The Borderman shifted his gaze, scanned his papers, and marked them with an entry stamp. Franciského watched as impassively as he could. “You’ll see a Cardinal-Guardian now,” the Borderman said. And later—a few minutes? An hour? A lifetime?—Franciského stood with one-hundred lumineri in his pocket and his best white shirt. He answered the Cardinal-Guardian’s questions: on his feet as the dark man sat on an austere and ominous stool. The stool and the Cardinal-Guardian were unapproachable behind a Barrier Line carved into the jigsaw-parquet tiles of a wood Franciského couldn’t name. He trembled. He felt a tickle of sweat on his brow. The Cardinal-Guardian’s office was little more than a cubicle in the colors of noon-light and wood. It smelled of strange and expensive incense: myrwood or some such exotic. There was a single drop of blood on the floor between Franciského’s feet, a mean, splattered star in the color of rust on wood the color of honey. It was a terrifying incongruity, and he wondered if blood was the price paid if the Iodine Archipelago rejected an Initiato-aspirant. “And what Tree have you chosen?” the Cardinal-Guardian asked, leaning forward, as if to read more fear written across the back of Franciského’s brain. He was darker than Franciského, and bald. His eyes—if Franciského judged their color correctly—were the color of obsidian: all pupil and no iris. Inhuman. He glanced down at the Barrier Line; it was drawn, he imagined, with the point of a knife. He glanced up and met the Cardinal-Guardian’s brain-boring gaze. The man—as expected—wore a gray cassock and soft buskins of some expensive material: veltin, perhaps, or something no Inlander could name. He squared his shoulders and drew a deep, calming breath. “The Tree of Unspoken Truths,” he said as firmly as he could. “And,” he added, “The Tree of Maps.” The black man in the gray cassock smiled; he wore a band of gold on his marriage finger, and hints of some long-faded tattoo marked his left wrist like a complex, braided bracelet. Something glinted in his all-pupil gaze: a look of surprise, perhaps, or a look of amusement; he wasn’t a black man of Pô or Dvora, and so Franciského questioned what he actually knew of the man’s non-verbal language of smirks and lip-puckering smiles. Franciského stood in silence. “You’re an ambitious young buck.” Franciského allowed himself a shrug. “I have a lot to learn.” “You know something already.” “It’s not enough.” “It’s a start, Franciského Merhalhéis. You’ll take your next step on the island of Tôth. Your indenture begins there if you have no objections.” Tôth. He knew that name. The islands of the Iodine Archipelago were mapless, arcane, and invoked in superstitious whispers among Inlander cane farmers. No one knew all of the island names, but Tôth was where the medical things came from: the treatments and the remedies beyond the understanding of any Mainland doctor. The entire Archipelago carried the name of Tôth’s master industry. Even the arrogant Nôrôtôs invoked the name of Tôth in defense against goiters and dysplasia, or hypothyroidic retardation in young, young children. Now… …more than a year-and-five-fingers past his first steps onto the islands of the Iodine Archipelago, Franciského, changed from his featureless, gray work-clothes, and prepared for the evening. He’d made plans with his roommate, and he could hear Cheovar Jora behind him. He’d seen black people like Cheovar, but scarcely among the Nôtôrôs, or his own people. They lived—if anywhere he recognized—in the coastal sweep of Dvora, or the lowlands of Pô. Now… …there was indolent humidity in the air: the promise of rain, of shifting floors and the sound of distressed vomiting from the newest indentured-trainees from the Mainlands. It was difficult, Franciského knew, for most first-year indentureds to acclimate themselves—without wretching—to the distinct, shifty nature of the Iodine Archipelago. The islands—Tôth, largest among them—were little more than the illusion of land. The islands—Tôth, largest among them—were the growth of strange scabs on the face of the ocean. No son of mine goes to a place like that! Pápé said in ways that announced his dumb, superstitious fears. Man Father always maintained, is a land creature, and not some dumb animal that scrabbles among Mangrove roots adrift on fickle, dangerous waves. Man is a land being with allegiance to family and state, not alchemists on tangled mats of wood and sponge-coral, bobbing up and down like a fisherman’s cork. “Shut up, Pápé,” Franciského said. “I’m not your son anymore…you said so yourself.” “I think you are reading the wrong Tree again.” The voice, as it came to Franciského, was comforting and a welcome intrusion; it broke the inward spiral of his thoughts, ripping him from past into present, but gently so. He smiled, and drew a deep breath, and felt tension bleed from his spine as he slid his feet into the most comfortable pair of sandals he owned. He’d spent most of the late afternoon in his hammock, reading, studying, and now—as the sun flared bloated and ruddy to the west—he felt the need to leave the quiet indoors and stalk the wood-plank streets like any restless guy at the onset of the night. His past—now so far behind him—had chosen this night to reassert itself, and he felt its grip on him— —until Cheovar spoke from his side of the small, shared room with a voice as warm and intoxicating as sweetened bladderweed sap left to ferment in the sun. “I think,” Franciského said, “I am feeling nostalgia’s evil sister.” “It happens,” Cheovar said. “You should fight it.” “How? It comes on its own. I don’t invoke it.” “Finish dressing. I’ll show you. Later.” He’d spent the day working in the distillery: far from Pápé and his recriminations. “They’re proud of their goiters, their dysplasia, and their mental defects,” Franciského had said, over today’s now-past lunch—savoring the still-new Initiatto words. He enjoyed lunch with Cheovar. He enjoyed life with Cheovar, and felt that he always would. “You’re Initiatto now,” Cheovar said—picking at his seaweed salad, sprinkled with ground peppercorns, sesame, and strange, reddish nuts. He’d taken Franciského to lunch on one of the tiny restaurant-moored along the thick and undulant reed-mat coast of Tôth. “It doesn’t change who I was, or how I’d been shaped.” “Nothing ever changes that, Francis: but change is never the goal. That’s what makes us different from Mainlanders—they seek to change us, themselves, and the whole-wide-world, but this isn’t right. Growth is more important…always more important.” *** Supper—as always—had been a quiet affair with Cheovar. They ate in the most familiar of cheap island-local eateries, and so they ate in the company of those they saw at work, in training, and in the classes required of all Initiatto indentures. The faces were—for the most part—male. There were women among the Initiatto but they were as keen to keep among themselves as the men. It was an aspect—said the local theorists—of the Archipelago’s distinct nature. The eatery—like every other local establishment—was built of wood: most of which Franciského judged as some cheap import from a wooded, coastal nation. Whole forests did not grow on the islands. The islands themselves were little more than vast, living mats afloat on the face of the Crescent Bay, and the waters of the Great Eastern Ocean. Tôth, the largest of the islands, was little more than the root structure of the oldest local tree: an impressive umbrella-shape marking the center of the island. For centuries its roots spread outward and out, forming a convenient substrate for mosses and lichens to take hold. From beneath the ocean surface, limpets and corals anchored themselves, and in the most ancient days of the floating island, the first Initatto came, and built their first huts, and the first sails intended to take the island farther into the ocean, where it might meet other islands and find protection against Mainlander raids. Now, hundreds of years after the first Initiatto claimed and named Tôth, the island continued to grow. The central tree (now burdened with a forest-ring of saplings) sent creeper roots farther and farther to sea, intermingling them with the roots of saplings and interloper trees, all ocean-adapted, all capable of giving homes to bladder-fish and delicate vine-clams, darters, and saltwater planarians. The eatery—so familiar a place to Franciského—stood on the newest, solid mass of root-mat. The floor, if he looked down, seeped with water on high-wave days, and like any Initiatto he found a certain pleasure in squishy, barefoot steps through the wood-plank streets or through new buildings on the outskirt edges of the world’s strangest civilization. “Do you ever wonder why it is that you really came here?” Cheovar asked, between courses. They’d finished their seaweed salads and waited for the delicacy-fish that was central to the eatery’s menu. “Sometimes,” Franciského said. “I’ve always been an outsider back home…I never really fit in.” “Because you like guys?” “More than that. Because I don’t know how to get excited over insignificant things. I don’t know how to worship sacred rocks or how to see the Sacred Virgin Astrea in the burn patterns on toast. I see burn patterns, instead, I see normal things with no mystery to them, and I think that mysteries…real mysteries…are more fascinating, but harder for normal people to see.” Cheovar smiled. He had lean features in the color of a toasted pecan’s shell. His hair, as black as Franciského’s own, lay like felt on the crown of his skull. “I came,” Cheovar said, “because I knew I’d die among the religionists of my home country. Life among them was hard enough; I couldn’t bear the idea of death there too.” “You never talk about your home country very much,” Franciského observed. “There’s no need. The Archipelago is my home now…why talk about it when all I have to do is get up out of my hammock—or yours, look around and see it? What is there to say when seeing is so much better?” “And,” Franciského said. “You want to show me something.” It might have been a question, and he tasted interrogation in those words, but something in his throat—and maybe in the words themselves—lent a questioning tone to the sound of his voice, as he heard it in that space between his ears. “Yeah,” Cheovar said, “It’s a lot like what we show each other every night…but different, too. It’s…I don’t know…something I’ve always wanted to say to you, but could never think of how. I think you need me to say it…or you need me to show it to you, because it’s something about why you’ve come…about why I’m here as well. It’s something every Initiatto learns on his own, or on her own…but it’s mundane to us and so it’s never what anyone would think to say, to show, or to even think about on those nights when it’s quiet and the floors are dry.” “And why now?” Franciského asked. “Why tonight?” “Because we have one year to go before we’re full Initiatto…one year to go before we’ve proved our worth to society and ended our indenture. We’ll be able to go wherever we want; there are more than eighty islands at our disposal. There’s no guarantee that either of us will stay on Tôth, that neither of us will meet someone else to share a hammock with at night…and well…I’m okay with that, okay with sharing your hammock, your sweat, and everything else we share…but things will change in one year, and I just want to give you something that you can cherish for the rest of your life, whether you cherish it with me, or with someone else.” “And an expensive dinner is a part of that?” “The first part.” Franciského nodded, smiling to himself. *** To the land-lubber’s eye, the Iodine Archipelago was a shifty and unclear place: disturbing and protean in its strange, largely vegetative nature. But always, always, (and always still) it was the horizon that told the difference as it bobbed up and down, down and up as if seen from the deck of some vast, seagoing boat. At an hour past full-night, Franciského walked with Cheovar through the wood-plank streets of Tôth, marveling—as always—at the absence of horses and carriages, and at the wooden-whisper buildings like the thin, fluted shells of delicate sea-things. The bells of Mayor’s House rang out the full-night hour, and the sound—as Franciského heard it—recalled the eight-bells of ocean-boat time. He’d had his fill of red-fin and salad, of imported wine, and a gentlemen’s cup of coffee to finish it all off. He’d blushed at Cheovar’s insistence at paying the full tab, and now, as Tôth (and every other island) bobbed on choppy waters announcing the approach of hard weather, Franciského walked with bare feet, feeling the squish of water between his toes. The whole island was a sodden promise of rain, of wind, and of seasick newcomers. He laughed at the idea of the moans and vomits of so many post-Mainlander boys, and more than a few girls, driven beyond whatever bluffs and bravados their former societies demanded of them. The first lesson of the Iodine Archipelago was the same for everyone: abandon your past…it serves no purpose here and in the future you’ve accepted for yourself. Cheovar led him the length of CenterMark Street and left (at an acute angle) onto First. Westbound. Franciského knew, from the direction and what he could read of Cheovar’s mood, that they were headed to the coast, to the place where fisher-boats came into floating dock and unloaded their flapping, silver cargo at market. It would take long, long minutes to make the walk—perhaps only a few fingers short of an hour, but they’d make the trip on foot; their steps silent (and squishing) until Cheovar found the point at which they should stop. Later—at home—they’d wash sea-brine from their feet. But for now, it was good enough, appropriate enough, to accumulate it. Tôth, largest of the islands in the Archipelago, stretched a full sixty-three kilometers from shoreline to its central tree. Franciského and Cheovar walked only a fraction of that distance: the central, umbrella mass of the tree behind them, and open ocean to their faces. Once, Tôth’s tree lived in the minds of its inhabitants as The Tree of Cold Mercies, as generations in the past, its surrounding root mass offered few of what modern Initatto could recognize as comfort by any stretch of vivid imagination. Tôth was shelter for misfits and ruffian scum at run from one version of law or another. Tôth was silence for those who needed it, and in time, home to those who could make no home elsewhere. Tôth, under the rulership of The First Mayor, learned its nature, slowly…oh, so slowly…and set sail until meeting the second island in Archipelago history. Franciského felt this history pressing in around him as he walked with Cheovar—now, holding his hand, now pulling him close with one arm around Cheovar’s waist. Thunder boomed to the west: a low, rolling sound, and Franciského knew that the coming storm was still far to sea, still a day’s journey (by wind standards) from the farthest island in the Archipelago. Weathermen occupied the watch-towers, keeping an eye on the aerostats and barometers; they spoke (through vast spools of copper wire) to the Yeoman of the Isles, and the whole Archipelago—nearly a hundred islands—all spun their deep-water propellers in slow, slow movement that would take them south of the storm. South! Franciského if the Archipelago’s course was what determined Cheovar’s choice to show him something. South…. Whatever Cheovar had to show him, he’d learn of it only as it greeted his eyes: in the darkness, and with the sound of thunder far, and farther still, to the west. *** There were no buildings over the height of two stories anywhere in the Archipelago. The physical nature of the islands prevented any massive-scale construction. All houses, all places of business, all buildings of any sort were hewn from imported wood, or from roots grown along the guides of one complex trellis or another. It took years to grow a root-house, and more voodoo-brew stuff made from shark cartilage and rotting fruit sugars than Franciského cared to think about. Cheovar walked with him—through winding back alleys and cramped little squares, until their footsteps squished and slurped in still and cloying brine as warm as blood and thick with some slick algae. The smell was sweet and redolent with fermentation, and as Franciského took in the scent, the identity of the place seeped into his mind like drippings from an overhead eave. Tôth was growing—sending out new growth—and this mucky, mushy place was where the Tree of Cold Mercies hadn’t hardened its ever-expanding net of roots. “When I arrived on-island,” Cheovar said. “This was still underwater. In daylight it was nothing but a fringe of maggot-white tendrils, waving in the current. Now, it can support human weight, and I come here, sometimes, to mark the growth, and imagine what we might build here in two decade’s time.” There was lantern-light: behind them. It was a warm presence at Franciského’s back. Ahead, there was only darkness, broken only by the cold gleaming of distant, distant stars. There were shore lights as well…Dvoran lights, and the lights of Pô, if Franciského guessed correctly. There were boats in the far, far waters: the night-boats of fishermen, Archipelagan and Mainlander alike. Perhaps, where the lights bobbed on sullen and indolent swells, there was trade: or at least bluster and bluff over casks of hard wine, beer, or whatever else Mainlander boats served belowdecks to occasional Islander guests. There were always guests from one Island or another—there was always trade: a flask of iodine for a sliver of metal, a polished stone, or nights with a deck-boy, not yet brave enough to openly declare his deviation from the heterosex line and thus, a member of the Initiatto ranks. Franciského knew his share of local village boys who’d taken to sea only to vanish; there was always word that they’d gone to the Iodine Archipelago and abandoned their Names-That-Must-Only-Be-Whispered. He didn’t envy them, these quiet boys with their hospitality names intact; they could return no more than he could, and they had harsher reasons for staying. The comforts of Tôth’s central tree were cold, indeed. “When I’m an old man,” Cheovar said. “I’ll be able to stand here and see where the island has grown even more. I’ll be Archipelagan and a full Initiatto and everyone back there who has ever despoiled my name and my feelings because of my homophile’s blood, will depend on the fruits of my labor to control their goiters, or keep their spastic children from dying of some archaic neurological decay.” In the darkness, Cheovar shifted, drew a slow and languorous caress up the sweep of Franciského’s arm. The touch rode here, lingered there; and at last, his fingers brushed a light caress across Franciského’s cheek and played—like feathers and like kisses—across his lips. “You argue with your father,” Cheovar said. “He’s still a part of you. This is normal, but as you say yourself, he’s disowned you, he’s turned his back. You owe him nothing, not even memories that hurt you.” Franciského closed his eyes and swallowed past a sudden lump in his throat. The urge to cry? He didn’t know. As if in accordance with some wordless drive burning deep in his veins, Cheovar clasped both of Franciského’s shoulders and turned him around. Gently. “This is what I wanted to show you,” Cheovar said. Softly. There were lamps: a whole sea-surface constellation of green, gray, cold-white, and warm-amber lights. There were paper lanterns, swaying on their poles in the light night winds. Handlers would pull them into shelter when the storm approached—to the north—with force enough to rock the Archipelago on sullen, restive waves. The lights defined the shape of Tôth’s geography: its neighborhoods and areas of industry. There was a slope. All of those lanterns and glowing lamps in clouded glass globes seemed to ride the shadows like fragments of starlight on a vast, complex sheet of black veltin. And there…at the crest of everything, like the center of the world itself, Tôth’s central tree blazed like a luminous umbrella wreathed in stars. The Tree of Cold Mercies. “When it is time,” Cheovar said, “to leave your past behind and forget all that you’ve endured, come here…come here with me. Feed the scum and the bacteria, feed the big, dumb planarians and the skittish isopods with their funny little fringes. “Feed the roots of our tree and let him grow, so that later…tomorrow…and the tomorrow after that…we can keep those strings of lights burning, and show everyone on land that there is a place for people like us.” And then, in silence, Cheovar pulled Franciského into a soft, warm embrace. He brushed the lightest possible kiss across Franciského’s lips and nestled his chin in the crook of Franciského shoulder and neck. He smelled of brine and the night’s consumed alcohol, he smelled of peppercorns, and the gentleman’s coffee he’d consumed (and paid for) in the cheap and comfortable eatery. In silence, Franciského returned his embrace, his kiss, and after a long while, simply stared at the light-wreathed tree, looming in the distance. Out to sea— (far, far away) —thunder rolled through unlit clouds. THE END Thank you for reading and commenting, and I hope you've enjoyed this first foray into the Iodine Archipelago.