Tundra

Until the tide comes in. That was the meaning of the tattoo on Eiron’s expansive, furrowed back, in the place where Cleaved Tide runes are said to protect the wearer. Until the tide came in, that was how long Eiron would row without growing tired or capsizing. That was how long the spell of his runes would protect him. The cyclical nature of the tide meant that it was almost a synonym for, ‘Until the end of time.’

Until the tide comes in, Eiron prayed. Until the tide comes in, keep me safe. His prayers came true. He washed up on a beach with Aais, the sea monster who had dreamed of seeing the shore, and had thereafter only dreamed. Both coughed up lungfuls of sea water, retching onto the flat, packed sand.

The selkies had brought them here, after Eiron’s druid given bubble had expired. It had taken him a long time to wrangle that syllable from them –the one enchanted word that would give him half an hour of breathless life– but he had got it in the end, and it had saved his skin. The seal men and women had a bargain with the Seafarers, who left them alone and did not fish in their bays, in exchange for protection from the worst of the elements. Eiron had therefore stayed a brief time in the kelp forest, before being dragged, spent and useless, to the water’s surface away from the open ocean, where the bounty hunting pirates had been.

‘When the tide comes in,’ one of the seal people said, once on land and in human form among the ordinary, basking seals, ‘then there’s us.’ Then, the lot of them had sprung back into the waves, and vanished.

Aais turned onto his side, and discovered that he was sick with the sea. He also discovered that he could breathe. The gills that had previously siphoned oxygen from his watery surroundings now gasped in fresh mouthfuls of air. In the tongue he thought the man would be most likely to understand, the sacred tongue rumoured to have come from above the waves, Aais spoke to his original rescuer.

‘Hassis,’ he said, reverently. ‘It’s you!’ Webbed hands gently traced the contours of Eiron’s face, confirming that he was real. ‘My god. My god! But...’ Aais hesitated. ‘You should not have been so close to the shore!’

Eiron chuckled, wondering whether this newcomer, who obviously manhandled the tongue, knew the proper word for ‘hero’. ‘Not likely,’ he said.

‘Then this is an ill omen!’ Aais cried. Hassis, the god of turning tides, was often known to save karakos in trouble, but he was never known to stray far from the open ocean. For him to drift so far towards the continental shelf as to be in the place Aais had found him would mean that he was abandoning most of the clan.

Eiron shook his head. ‘No omen,’ he replied. ‘Just trying to find some druids. I don’t like being inland any more than you do, trust me. Where I come from, it’s a disgrace even to eat and drink from the land, let alone to steal from it. Those mammoth riders you see?’ He pointed at a cliff top in the distance, where a procession was marching by. ‘They have many things –food, leathers, ivory–, but only a coward goes after land bound prey.’

Aais was confused, and so he said nothing at first. Then, ‘You are a good hunter,’ he remarked. It was more of a comment than a question or a statement begging explanation. He had only just remembered that the god of turning tides also participated in the shoal hunts with the god of sharks.

Eiron only shook his head. ‘If you’re coming,’ he said, clambering to his knees and then up onto his feet, so that his full, gigantic height was on display, ‘then you’d better get along.’