The surf rocked against the wall, far below the wooden pilings of the Eyrie. The air was full of gullsong, and the falling leaves from the maples above the docks. There were only two ships in port. Three, if you counted the Magdalena, though the old man wouldn’t. The Magdalena would go sailing no more, not so long as old Cortham spent his evenings drunk off his arse and his days asleep in the berth, using the old sails for bedsheets.
The boy, Fastermender, was off again, chattering in his ear like always. “Omen-town should be back before the week is out, now. Come a-sliding in, over the water, just about... There! Coo!” Fastermender pointed to a spot a few hundred yards out, punctuating the gesture with a curious little whooping sound that always made the seagulls jump. He laughed. “I seen it once, when I were a boy.”
“You’re still a boy now,” said the old man, half out of reflex.
“Hey, now! I don’t answer my da when he calls me tha’, and I don’t have to hear it from you, neither, mate.”
The old man grunted, gumming toothlessly at the saltwater in his beard. He turned and spat in the sea, then trained his rather pearly eyes on the snarled net. His hand shook as he attempted to thread the metal needle through the snag. His scrawny, whip-scarred body was almost as knotted as the net itself, though his skin showed a faint rainbow iridescence underneath the sun-browned surface. What looked like a set of cat-scratches behind each of his ears rippled slightly, in time with his breathing. Gills.
“What’s the farthest you’ve ever been, then? Blacktern?”
“Yes.”
“Cutwater?”
“…Yes.”
“Pelagius?”
“Powers preserve us… Look, lad, let’s just say I been quarter of the way around the wall and back again and let’s have done with it, alright?” the old man snapped.
This gave Fastermender a moment’s pause. Then, “What does *tha’* even mean? Quarter of the way around? Nobody’s been to the other side of the wall. I’m not five years old, mate, I know tha’ much.”
“I didn’t say I’d been on the other side of the wall, I said I’d been around it. Because it curves, like.”
The younger man turned around, looked out along the wall, to wear it disappeared into mist and reflected sunlight sparkling off the ocean. “No, it doesn’t. It just goes on and on, mate. It’s flat for miles. Everybody knows that.”
“No, it’s not,” said the old man, as patiently as he was able. “It only looks like it is. On account of the size of it.”
Fastermender screwed up his face, puzzled. “What?”
“It’s *curved*. Look, I’m telling you the way our navigator told it to me, boy, so don’t look at me like that. They done the calculations, right, maybe even at the schools in your precious Omen-town. And,” he put down the net and needle to gesture at the wall at their backs. “it curves up and down as well.”
Fastermender craned his head back. He looked back at the old man, wrinkling his nose. “It does not.”
“I can’t believe I’m going to be the best education you’re going to have, boy, but yes, it’s true. It’s a sphere, lad.”
“What, like a… blue gem?”
“No! Well, sort of. Depends who you ask. But what I mean is it’s round, it’s a-- a ball, like, it’s-- it’s a globe, alright? It’s a sodding globe. And huge.”
“Oh,” said Fastermender, after a while. He sounded unconvinced.
Sighing, the old man picked up the needle and net, hunching down over them once more. If he could just fit the mending needle under this one loop...
“They say there’s a hole in it,” said Fastermender suddenly. “…Tha’ there’s a crack in the wall, if you can believe that. Ever seen it, mate?” the little man asked, on tenterhooks, gawping like a crow on a hot day. “Ever been out that far?”
The old man said nothing. If he could just stop his damn hand from shaking, even for a *second*… Damn his hand! Cursing, he threw the needle into the hempen basket at his side.
Fastermender watched all this without any particular interest. He continued, “Big as a ship, I heard! But you canna just sail through for some reason, you crash. Big as the biggest ship you ever saw, mate! Coo!” Fastermender had got to his feet, staring out along the seawall with a big, pumpkin grin on his face. He pumped his fist and laughed out loud, skipping a stone across the dock. A seagull leapt from the mooring post as the smooth, flat stone embedded itself in the moss-eaten wood.
The old man’s brow furrowed. “Bigger,” he said.
“Eh?” The gawky youth blinked, turned, and cocked his head, all in one motion, like a knot unraveling.
“The hole. It’s bigger than a ship. It’s maybe about as wide across as this town, but it’s taller than the lighthouse. Goes up and down, both ways. Not sure how deep it is, but it’s got to be at least a quarter-mile to the top.”
Fastermender’s face fell a little, made half the journey toward youthful truculence. “Don’t make fun just because I never left the Eyrie, mate.”
“I ain’t makin’ fun. Just tellin’ you what I seen. Ships can’t sail through, sure enough, but they couldn’t even if they wanted to. There’s no water.”
Fastermender scoffed. “What? How d’you mean, no water?”
“There’s no water. There’s nothin’. It just stops, and it’s just dark. And it goes on like that. Big hole with nothin’ in it,” the old man sat back, rubbing his beard on the bandages wrapped around his hand. “Me and some of the other sailors went out and swum up to it, once.”
“What, like as a dare? Bloody dangerous dare!”
“No. Safe as sinning, they said. You couldn’t go over or nothin’,” the old man’s pearl-coloured eyes looked out past the horizon, shining with distant recollection. “I was a young man, then, and I was curious. We all had our jigger of rum together, and we counted to four, and we dove off the ship. We swum up,” he said, “and when you got close, you could put your hand right up against it.”
The old man smacked his lips, swallowed.
“You couldn’t even feel it. You just pressed your hand against it, and it was like it weren’t even there. Your hand just… stopped. Damnedest thing. We had a laugh, me and the other sailors. Tried all sorts of stupid things. You could punch it, see, and it was like… like all the swing just went out of your arm, right? It didn’t hurt you or it. It stopped you, same as it stopped the water. We did laugh,” said the old man, “but I tell you, it was hard looking over that edge. It’s hard remembering it, how there wasn’t no shine to tell you it was glass, or a sparkle like some magician’s trick, like. Weren’t even an old story back at port about some god that done a miracle at that very spot ten thousand years ago. It’s just there. Just… a patch in the wall…”
Good stuff!
Is this an ongoing story we'll be privy to, or snapshots of things happening in the Hinterlands?
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