The Ephrebet Bed
an excerpt

from chapter 5:

Only the sounds of waves and the creaking of the ship followed the end of Kari’s story. Even the quiet weepers held back their crying. Bunia reached for Kari’s hand and found her stomach first, but soon fingers touched fingers. The women held onto each other in the dark, stinking, quiet hold.

A voice came, as if from far away, speaking in an accent that Bunia only half followed. It told of a plumber’s life--the laying of pipes through houses, under streets, the cleaning out of them, of Marik-the-voice’s-owner who followed his father into the life of copper and lead and insulation. He fulfilled a great demand for such skills, as the Empire expanded, developing the islands under its care. When the processor fell and the control of the Empire slipped from his island, a group of local men assumed control. It took only one protest from Marik’s mouth and, in the next night, a small band of men came for him and his golden-haired wife and sold them to a ship in the harbour.

The stories came in quick succession after that, one following from the other with barely a pause between. Builders, shopkeepers, mothers, former soldiers and more told how they had come to be a prisoner in the hold of the Zariya. Some spoke only a few sentences, or fewer; other tales were long and complicated. It seemed that even while they ate, even while Bunia dozed, someone continued talking.

After between twenty and thirty tales, Bunia continued from the end of one shopkeeper’s with her own.

“I am Bunia, from a town called Lunkeiko on the continent.” She wavered momentarily, thinking of her house, her furniture shop, her mother and her friends. “I had to leave. You have heard of the City Dominion, I suppose. They came to my town and won several battles and then it was theirs, and they weren't too bad at first, though we hated to see their men walk through our streets as if we were a favoured toy. But then they said we had to worship their gods. They wanted us to pretend that Temerayi and Li-guyo and Orelaiko and all the rest were lies, were stupid make-up stories.

“I know you probably haven't heard of my town's gods, I am sure you do not believe in them. But imagine if someone said to you that your god or your gods were wrong, were not real.

“Of course I did not change the gods I worshipped.

“I am not anyone of importance. I have not been involved in politics, I did not fight against the City when they first came. My father did, but he was only a Lieutenant. I was just a woman with a furniture shop, hardly remarkable in a town where furniture shops are almost as common as temples.

“I don't know why they singled me out, but they did. They took a handful of people from the town and… and…”

She could not say.

In Lunkeiko, her friends had known what happened. They had seen it, or heard from those who had. She had not needed to speak of it unless she chose--and she chose rarely, with her mother and a small number of close confidantes--and they knew, anyway, from her decision to leave the town for an indefinite length of time, how it had affected her.

“Skip that bit,” whispered Kari.

“I left,” she said. Her voice held almost steady. “I needed to get away, for a while. There was nothing I could do.” Again she faltered, thinking, Was there? Was there?

Kari’s fingers tightened around hers, Kari’s thumb rubbed across her knuckles.

Quietly, quietly she said, “I needed to get away. Just for a while. When I was… back in Lunkeiko, when things were happening, I heard a story about something called the Ephrebet bed. The Ephrebet are mirs--I know, I know you hate them, they destroyed your processor, but I didn’t know that at the time, and besides, this happened before then. I own a furniture shop in Lunkeiko and I thought I could come to Serrian Empire, acquire some pieces for my shop and search for the Ephrebet bed for myself. To see it, to have something that has such an interesting history. I thought it would be nice.”

Tears dampened her cheeks.

“Why don’t you tell us the interesting history,” murmured Keri, loud enough to garner assent from people nearby.

She sniffed, nodding. It took no effort to recollect the story; she’d written it in her journal a few weeks after hearing it and re-read those pages many times.

“The Ephrebet bed’s history goes like this, in the version I heard:

“It begins at the end, with a girl and a beach. She sits day and night on a pale rock, combing her long, dark hair like ropey deep-water and singing to the waves. Few dare approach, for fear her voice will break them on rocks. But she was no danger to them--only a lonely child, singing of days when she swam among the wood reef of her home, and holding onto the relic of that time.

“Here I was told about the mirs--they are only legend in my hometown, so far from the seas they call home. I was told about their raycities, which apparently are all dead now. I was told about their blue skin, their webbed hands and feet, their soft, sibilant voices and the gills on their necks. I suppose that is nothing new to you. But this girl did not grow up in one of the raycities, and perhaps that is new to some of you.

“A small group of mirs calling themselves the Ephrebet lived in the wooden reefs lining the cliff-shore of a rocky island--called Lerrit’s Scourge, I later learnt. One of the passengers on the Gilganell told me that the name comes from a man, Lerrit, who for some reason was remembered more than the many others dashed against those rocks. Now, I wanted to interrupt this tale’s teller to say that wooden reefs cannot exist. Wood becomes ‘logged and weak underwater. But this was not quite normal wood. It did not grow from the side of the rock, with roots buried deep inside. It was quite dead. No, it grew like limestone, made up of countless tiny pieces of sediment, but rather than being formed of dead animals, it was formed of wood sediment. Splinters and grains from sunken ships, particularly those wrecked against the island, but also from crates that fall from a ship during a storm, from crumbling piers on far-off isles and any other kind of wood that makes it way into the sea--the Ephrebet sang to it, calling it to them and carefully crafting it into their reef. They fashioned many other items from their wood: furniture, jewellery… the comb in the girl’s hand.

“Once a year, a number of their population journeyed to the city-island of Aylair, a great trading port, so that they could sell their wares in return for new and interesting foods, trinkets and other things from the islands. The girl’s tale really starts there, on her first voyage to Aylair. She stood on the deck of the wooden ship, the salty wind flowing through her deep-water hair and nipping at her blue skin, and she dreamed of the port ahead and the wonders she would see.

“Like all girls, she created expectations against which reality fell short.

“Aylair is a grand city, I have heard--” and murmurs said that yes, it was certainly large and possibly even grand “--but she could not see its beauty. The magic waste obscured from view all but the buildings closest to where she stood. What little she did see suggested none of the architectural variety she was used to in the reef, where the nature of water allowed structures that gravity would confine on land. I do not know if Aylair is in fact beautiful and strange, but she did not think it so. To her the buildings were crudely hewn slabs. People shouted and shoved and gave her leery looks; they were taller and broader than she, even their girl-children, and many treated her with a derision flimsily concealed by their interest in the goods of her kind.

“As is often the case, there was one exception.

“On the mirs’ final day in Aylair, when the girl was sitting along a wharf, her legs dangling in the sea and her mind already at home in the wooden reef, a young dark-haired men approached her and, folding his long limbs to sit beside her, said, ‘The place you come from must be very beautiful.’

“Like any homesick creature, she leapt at the opportunity to share the beauty of her home with another. She told him of the wooden reef, of its twists and turns below the surface of the blue sea--barely touched by the magic waste, they were so far from the processor--and when he asked her which direction it lay in she held out her slender arm to the south-east. ‘Under the point of the tail-stars, where rock meets wave, and a lot of ships meet rock,’ she said as softly as surf at a peaceful sunset, almost forgetting the young man’s presence.

“ ‘I thank you for sharing your story,’ he said, and slipped away into the afternoon.

“She did not see him again, and when the mirs set sail the next morning for their home she had forgotten about him. Her memory was soon refreshed. From afar they saw the smoke climbing into the bright blue sky; before reaching their home the mirs wept, knowing its fate. To the girl’s utter horror, she saw the dark-haired young man at the helm of a pirate vessel, commanding his crew to take as many of the reef’s contents as possible and burn the rest--and it burnt, though it was underwater. There must have been some magic at the man’s disposal.

“The Ephrebet mirs could do nothing to stop him. They had no weapons and he seized their ship. Oh, few were harmed--they are creatures of the ocean, after all--but they acted as though dying. Their keens tore the sea for weeks, until a raycity drew near and offered them a place with the rest of their race.

“The girl would not join them. Overflowing with more guilt that her small body could hold, she swam away in search of the dark-haired man and his stolen treasures.

“Years passed. She found only threads and whispers of the strange artefacts’ whereabouts. Gradually those glimmers told her of decomposition in the dry air. After several years, only one piece remained: a beautiful bed shaped in the S-shape of the mirs’ favourite sleeping position. It did not fall apart like the others. The girl chased it, followed a rumour to the island of Elessir--but there she found only a madman who slept on a bed of flotsam, kicking it about in his sleep until it resembled an S.

“She gave up then, according to the tale. She took up her place on the rock, combing her hair and singing.

“I do not know what she did next. It has been pointed out to me that she is probably not on Elessir any longer; she has probably grown up and gone away. But it seemed to me that Elessir would be a good place to go, just in case anyone there knows where the mir-woman is now.

“But I didn’t make it,” she finished, twisting her nightdress into contours lost to the darkness and the stench. “I didn’t make it.”