DESPITE the season, despite this being only one of the island’s ports, Fintz maintained a very active trade with dozens of surrounding islands, and as the morning brightened through the heavy rains, the pier where Pizlo knelt filled with people. No one spoke to him or sought to offer any assistance. Astonishing and unprecedented as the facts appeared, word that an abomination from another island had come to Fintz had spread far and wide. Eyes averted, they walked past him and went about their errands, each person wondering at the ill omen of two such creatures upon their shore.
Pizlo rose, the dead infant cradled in his arms, letting the rain wash away his tears. He stood, surrounded by denial, and rushed back up the pier to the main boardwalk of the harbor. He strode into the mass of people, scattering them with his presence and shouted.
“This is what you are. This is what you’ve done. I don’t care that you won’t answer me.” He said the words over and over, his voice soft and hoarse from crying. It didn’t matter that they refused to hear him. He accompanied the spoken message, pounding out an infrasonic beat that demanded attention like a lost child. They turned at that, driven by instinct hardwired into their cells, and then recoiled as conscious thought informed unconscious behavior. Abomination. Using their own humanity against them. If anything, they turned away from him even faster.
“You can pretend not to see or hear, but you do.” Pizlo sobbed. “You know. This is part of your story, each and every one of you. You think yourselves the heroes of your tales, but explain that, tell me how that can be? What heroes embrace infanticide? What heroes laud neglect and suffering of a helpless newborn? Every last one of you is a baby killer by your inaction, your silent acquiescence.” His words reached more than a hundred Fant, but they were all too busy turning away and denying his existence to react to what they heard.
Pizlo wandered back down the pier toward Jorl’s boat. There was nowhere to go but home now. He had been so confident, armed with knowledge of the meta-story, the awareness that he was the hero of his life. He had identified the call to action, wavered, and then heeded it. He had embraced advice from his mentors. Leaving Keslo, the only home he had ever known surely counted as crossing the threshold into a new world. And he had been tested, pursuing the council, stealing their ink, achieving his goal. But that hadn’t been his quest at all. Or if it was, it didn’t matter. What satisfaction it might have brought him turned to ash when he’d found the abandoned infant.
He had always been different, always been the Abomination of Keslo. He knew the reasons for this; Tolta had never hidden it from him, and when he’d been old enough Jorl had explained the biology and the cruelty of that part of Fant culture. But even knowing the rhyme of it, he had never stopped to think that other islands might hold other abominations. “One in a million” Jorl had called him, but Barsk’s archipelagos were home to five and a half million Eleph and Lox. Surely that meant that other biological mistakes happened around him. Yes, he was a rarity. Jorl said that in all the history of Barsk, only a handful had lived even a few years. But here he was, Pizlo, a fourteen-year-old, older than any of his kind had any right to be. A fluke among flukes.
Tracking and finding the council, acquiring the ink to render his moons had been a false quest. What if all along his destiny had been to seek out others like himself? What if his purpose was to arrive at the moment some city abandoned a living abomination to the elements instead of placing the baby in its mother’s arms? Had he reached Fintz two days earlier might he have provided assistance? Was there some medical aid he might have brought to change the outcome? Or even the simple favor of his regard, the warmth of his own body cradling the infant, could that have saved it from its own genetic anomalies?
The realization that others like him lived and died exploded everything he thought he knew. It meant he didn’t need to be alone. All of the Archetype of Man’s stories of heroes and isolation came to him, and many heroes had found in the course of their own journeys the friend or companion that completed them and gave meaning and purpose. Had he, then, arrived too late? Surely if he had been Sundance then the broken newborn he carried could not be Butch. If he was Gilgamesh, how could Enkidu be dead before they even met?
But no, Pizlo knew, really understood, that it was futile to wonder such things. His own history notwithstanding, abominations did not survive. The timing of his arrival wouldn’t have made a difference. He was alone, and no quest could change that.
While a handful of nearby dockworkers studiously didn’t watch him he boarded Jorl’s boat and at last set his burden down. If the people of Fintz didn’t want their child while it lived, they didn’t deserve the corpse. Pizlo ascended to the wheelhouse, accessed the controls, and set a course for Keslo. He wasn’t a hero, and he just wanted to go home.
* * *
BARSK had a marine force. Boat theft was uncommon and piracy nonexistent. But plenty of drunken bachelors managed to strand themselves between islands, either running out of fuel if their craft had an engine or more commonly losing their oars or even falling overboard because of foolishness. And accidents happened, particularly given the extremes of the weather. Vessels capsized, or sometimes rammed one another when visibility dwindled and the ocean took matters into its own hands. The marines patrolled and responded quickly and efficiently. Many a Fant had a tale of being fished out of the water and owed their lives to those men and women.
Charting a direct course to Keslo and traveling at full speed, Pizlo drew the attention of his archipelago’s marines. Repeatedly they flagged him to slow down. He ignored them. They hailed him to stop. He didn’t and simply raced onward. Twice, marines in a smaller, swifter craft pulled alongside him, threatening to grapple their own boats to his with the intention to impound his vessel and arrest him pending trial, but each time he simply glared at them from the wheelhouse and within moments they fell away. Once the marines recognized him for an abomination they couldn’t demand he stop, couldn’t arrest him. Impressively, they followed him, perhaps telling themselves they didn’t so much pursue an abomination but rather a vessel in distress.
In two days he reached Keslo. As he docked the boat back in Jorl’s slip the marine escort put in at adjacent piers. There would be questions asked, obliquely at best. Pizlo gave no thought to how the harbormaster would explain any of it without talking about the unmentionable. He had other concerns. As he stepped onto the pier, the infant body once more in his arms, he couldn’t bring himself to feel any guilt over the inconvenience his travels might have caused anyone. In the scope of things, it just didn’t rate.
He ignored the routes that would take him up into the Civilized Wood and instead made his own path ever deeper into the Shadow Dwell. The boles of every meta-tree acknowledged his presence in hushed voices within his mind. Every rock and stream greeted him somberly. The small creatures that lived there in the island’s darkest places scurried and raced around him but never paused and he continued on with determination. He knew every step one could take in the Shadow Dwell, had rambled through the mud and dark of each bit of it from his earliest days. All of it spoke to him, guiding him to his destination. And in time he came to the spot where Jorl had buried Arlo, where he had watched from hiding as his father’s remains had been laid to rest. A cairn lay at the base of one of the city’s meta-trees, Arlo’s name carved into the wood. Pizlo set the tiny unnamed, unloved body down alongside Arlo’s spot. He roamed a while, gathering stones from brooks and riverlets, and when he had enough he covered over the child. Then he raised his head, gazed up as if through the forest and clouds to where Telko would hang in the sky.
“This could have been me here,” he said. “If I had died instead of lived, perhaps Arlo and Tolta would have given me a grave. It would have shocked everyone in Keslo, but surely no more than they did by acknowledging me as theirs. I don’t know if that’s ever happened before. I never thought to ask. Jorl might know. Fintz doesn’t deserve this child. Keslo neither. Probably no island does. But … Arlo does. And so it’s here now. And … and that’s all I have to say. People are all so stupid. Why are we so stupid?”
Safely hidden, Telko did not reply. And honestly, Pizlo didn’t want an answer anyway.