THE FIRST WARNING came from the dormouse.
Liriya smiled at the sound of her daughter’s delighted giggle belling through the quiet morning air. “What are you laughing at?” she asked.
“Look, Mama,” Nartab said. “He’s so cute!”
“Who is?”
“And he keeps running around,” Nartab went on, ignoring her mother’s question. “Back and forth and back and forth. He looks so funny!”
Liriya tossed a handful of fennel into her basket and stared in the direction her daughter was pointing. “I still don’t— Oh, there. It’s a dormouse.” She shaded her eyes with her hand for a better view, watching the fluffy-tailed rodent with bemused interest. “That’s odd. They don’t usually come out by day, only at night. I wonder what’s gotten into him?”
The dormouse darted one direction, then another, scurried over a rock, turned a few circles, and scuttled up and down the trunk of an oak tree gnarled with age, a gray blur against the craggy bark. On reaching the ground again, it came to a halt and gazed northward, round ears twitching and black eyes fixed on the sea. After a few moments of concentration, it spun around and whisked away inland, vanishing down the hill.
“What was he doing?” Nartab asked between giggles.
Liriya shrugged. “Maybe he’s lost his boot and was looking for it. Or, let’s see, maybe he had too much wine to drink.”
“Mama! Dormice don’t drink wine. And they don’t wear boots either.”
“No?” She tweaked her daughter’s nose. “What do you think he was doing, then? Why don’t you tell me a story about him while we work.”
She crouched down to pluck sage, relishing its pungent aroma and the warmth of the sun on her arms and back. The soft buzz of bees intent on their own harvest and the murmur of waves against the shore below were broken only by Nartab’s story, to which Liriya half listened and which seemed to involve a mama dormouse and a papa dormouse and an acorn and—
KAA-BOOOMMM.
Seemingly out of nowhere, a thunderous blast ripped through the stillness. All motion seemed to freeze, trapped in a moment that felt eternal, as if time itself had paused in shock.
Kaa-boom! Ka-boom, ka-boom, ka-boom.
Four more explosions crashed through the air like answering echoes, each following the other in rapid succession.
The soil under Liriya’s arms and cheek felt rough and grainy, scratching against her chin. The dusty scent of the dry earth filled her nostrils. She found herself lying prone on the ground, with no recollection of how she had gotten there. One elbow throbbed, as if she had fallen onto a protruding rock.
Scarcely noticing the pain, she scrambled to her feet, ears still ringing, and tensed all her muscles to . . . do what? Should she grab Nartab and run? Throw herself on top of the child to protect her from whatever danger threatened them?
Her eyes skittered here and there as she tried to pinpoint the source of the blasts, but everything seemed normal. The sun still shone, the light breeze still blew, the sea still stretched serenely out to the horizon, and the sole anomaly was the reverberation in her ears from the explosive crashes that had chopped through the peaceful morning like a cleaver through fish.
“Mama, what was that?” Tears of fright pooled in Nartab’s brown eyes and dripped down her cheeks, dormouse and story both clearly forgotten.
“I—” Her voice came out in a croak, and she broke off, not wanting to further alarm her daughter. Ignoring the weakness and trembling that assailed her, she tried again. “I’m not sure.”
She put her arm around Nartab’s shoulder in a comforting hug and switched her gaze to a group of her neighbors on the beach, hoping to get a visual clue from them. They had abandoned their various tasks and gathered in a knot, gesticulating, obviously talking about the sounds. They too were glancing around, and the women among them were keeping the children close, but they showed no signs of running or other drastic action.
One of the men kept pointing to the north, as if he thought the blasts had come from that direction. She herself had been in no condition to notice, but it seemed odd that such a phenomenon would originate out at sea.
Had it been thunder? But there had been no lightning, and besides being much louder, the sounds had resembled neither the dull rumble of distant thunder nor the sharp crack of an overhead strike. Anyway, only a few puffy clouds dotted the sky.
In the village, set on a flat shelf of land overlooking the beach, people were emerging from their houses, and they too appeared bewildered and apprehensive but not panicked.
Liriya’s pulse slowed at the sight of her neighbors’ measured reactions. Maybe her own panic had been unnecessarily overwrought. Whatever the cause of the blasts, Nartab needed some kind of explanation and reassurance.
“Maybe the mother goddess was talking to us,” she said. “I hope she didn’t laugh too hard when she saw she’d surprised me so much I tumbled into the dirt!”
This elicited a watery smile from Nartab.
A village woman strode to the top of the beach path and called something to the people on the sand, who laughed and dispersed. An old man went back to mending a fishing net, the other men resumed repairing a boat, the women turned back to the fish-drying racks, and the children returned to their games.
“Look,” Liriya said, pointing toward the reassuring activity. “Whatever it was, it’s probably nothing to worry about.” She smoothed her eight-year-old daughter’s hair, a wavy, dark-brown mass that glinted auburn where the sunlight caught it and was one of the few physical traits that Nartab had inherited from her. “Dry your eyes, now. We’ve almost got enough herbs. Let’s finish up here, quick quick quick, then we’ll go home and see whether anyone knows what that sound was. All right?”
“All right, Mama.” Nartab wiped her hands across her face, smearing it with dirt, and reached for a golden fennel blossom.
Liriya took a last look around, still frowning. She and her daughter were near the top of a low hill where wild herbs grew, the tall, feathery fennel and gray-green sage competing with scrub brush and weeds for growing space in patches of hardscrabble soil tucked between chalky rocks.
A gust of wind carried a dust plume toward the sea that stretched out below in a parade of gemstones, the translucent jade green of the shallows giving way first to turquoise, then to lapis lazuli. The promontory protruded into the sea, forming a headland that protected and overlooked the beach, which curved away to the west in a shallow crescent. At the far end of the stretch of sand, a giant’s staircase of jagged boulders tumbled into the dancing waves.
Behind her, towering over the crest of the hill, the oak tree spread its craggy branches like a mother bird protecting her young under her wings. Sunlight gleamed on its leaves, which fluttered in the breeze and dappled the ground in a shifting pattern.
Liriya hesitated, torn despite what she had said to Nartab. Would it be better after all to abandon the herbs and go back to the village now so she could see whether anyone knew what had caused those terrifying sounds? Even if all her neighbors were as ignorant as she, it would be reassuring just to talk it over with them and hear someone else say that it was probably nothing to worry about.
But no. They were almost finished, after all, and if they stopped gathering herbs now they would just have to come back another time.
She finally shrugged and returned to her work. The tranquil normality of her surroundings gradually diminished her alarm to mere residual uneasiness.
Nartab’s thin voice floated through the air in song, reassuring Liriya that the child, at least, had forgotten her fright. The song, a slow tune in a minor key, had been a favorite lullaby, and Liriya had sung it to her at bedtime every night when Nartab was younger.
The moon and the stars
will look after you.
Protectors high
in the sky.
They will take care of you.
As she listened, Liriya’s thoughts drifted as aimlessly as the oak leaf blown along by the breeze that skimmed over the ground before her. Her basket brimmed with fennel and sage, and Nartab’s was nearly as full. They had probably collected enough for the winter. In fact, there was enough to share. Maybe Goma would like some. Her arthritis was so bad now, it was hard for her to stoop down to pluck herbs. They should head home soon and hang them to dry. They would smell so good this winter, hanging from the rafters—
“Mama, is there going to be a storm?” Nartab interrupted her train of thought. She was staring out to sea.
“A storm?” Liriya cast a reflexive glance upward, but the sky overhead was still a cerulean blue. “No, I don’t think so. If so, it would be cloudy and windy. Anyway, it’s the wrong time of year. Why?”
“There’s storm clouds out there.” Nartab pointed to the north. “And I think I saw lightning.”
Liriya gazed at the light gray plume that billowed up on the far northern horizon. Although more or less the right color, it did not look to her like storm clouds. It was difficult to tell at this distance, but the shape and texture seemed wrong. It looked more like smoke. But how could the sea catch fire?
Nartab was right about one thing, though. Flashes of what could have been lightning were indeed flickering occasionally, high up in the gray plume.
“And where are all the birds?” Nartab asked. “Goma told me about a bad storm back when she was my age. She said all the birds went away right before.”
Her observant daughter was right again. Gulls, terns and other seabirds were almost always to be seen and heard overhead. But the sky was empty of them now, and the air was equally void of bird cries, a background noise she was so accustomed to she had not even noticed its absence.
Her mind went back to the dormouse. At the time, she had not given much thought to its agitated behavior, other than to find it amusing. Now, however, she remembered stories she had heard about animals behaving strangely just before earthquakes, as if they could somehow sense what was coming. And the dormouse had certainly been acting strangely. But there had been no earthquake. Only those inexplicable explosive blasts.
Was it her imagination, or was there an odd, expectant hush to the air? An unsettling stillness?
She glanced toward the shore, and her forehead puckered in a baffled frown. Not sure whether to believe her eyes, she picked her way through the rocks to the edge of the hill for a closer look.
The sea was receding.
We hope you are enjoying the book so far. To continue reading...
Copyright © 2025 All Rights Reserved
Please log in to recommend or discuss...
