Winner of The Letter Review Prize for Books
In Farthest Light
PROLOGUE
In the far eastern seas great storms hastened nightfall. Low black clouds were lit from within, soundless flashes of white fire in a great forge. Far below, endless waves crested and exploded in furious wind and rain. There were no seabirds, no leaping fish, no ships or nomadic rafts; for none dared venture this far into the open ocean, well beyond the last known land, where water writhed above the eternal darkness of the deep.
Yet below the surface, where almost no light reached, the water was calm. Here in the dark, jellyfish floated on timeless currents. Broken strands of seagrass ebbed just below the rolling white waves. Here the great whales entered their long sleep, suspended in vertical colonnades between the silent depths and the roaring surface.
Lifetimes had passed since the Dawn: a time become myth, when the hours of sunlight first lengthened, crops and livestock grew in abundance, and terrible night spirits of the woods and waters retreated. In forests and mountains far to the west, few now believed there had ever truly been a time before.
Yet as generations passed, the white-eyed sun-spirits grew agitated. In towns and cities from southernmost Hána to the jungles of the northern Archipelago, priests worriedly measured the shortening days and searched ever further for children gifted with the Light, ones to whom the sun-spirits granted their powers: children who might one day keep the Dark at bay. For as the years of Day once brought the magic of the Light, the years of Night bring the magic of the Dark. Yet even as the daily arc of the Sun began to lower towards the northern horizon, even as fewer children were found, the common folk believed only in the white-eyed gods and in the power of the Light.
None of this reached the whales, to whom the great cycles of Day and Night, the rise and fall of Light and Dark, are mere seasons, and a man’s life passes like a single wave on the sea. They slept soundlessly, rose upwards one by one to breathe, then sank down again to the colonnade. And so they waited for the turn of the season, heeding no storms and no calls from the surface above.
Yet something else moved beneath the restless ocean. Formless, shapeless, a great shadow gathered.
Slowly it rose to the surface. Waves broke against it and raindrops shattered as it rose onwards to the clouds. There, by the will of this mighty and dark colossus, the storm quickly softened, the sea grew still, the clouds cleared to reveal the white moon. Silvery, shimmering, an immense spirit took form.
At last the creature made of all darkness turned its face towards the stars and opened its eyes: black as the abyss.
CHAPTER ONE
The island of Hána, southernmost of the three Home Isles, lies low and green and fertile. From the High Country on its eastern shore the river Hán grows quick and wide on its meandering westwards course through rice terraces and millet fields, villages and towns, until at last it winds through the port capital of Etora and returns to the sea. Hána is an island famed for its mariners, craftsmen, and for the rule of the Taika, who holds his Peace over great swathes of the known world.
It was on this isle that the boy lived out his childhood in the port of Atatoka, one of several large coastal towns that lie between the cool rainforest valleys of the High Country and the wild southern seas. Atatoka was only a few days’ journey from Etora and was a town of great importance, famed for the quality of its timber and for its shipwrights, who built great outriggers for trade and for war. The boy was named Taralin, but went instead by the name Tara. His father Aran was a great and ambitious general, seldom home, and his mother Yarae was Steward of their province, ruling in the Taika’s name.
With such parents and without siblings Tara spent much time alone. A proud yet quiet boy, he wandered along creeks and up the cold rainforest valleys that rose northwards from Atatoka into the wild High Country. He followed the paths of deer, boar, even bears. He crept silently through enormous moss-draped stone ruins and immense ancient archways, relics of a civilisation lost. He climbed trees, feeling the motion of the wind, until he could see all the way to the coast and the southwards curve of the Arcstones, past which there is only ocean and eventually the Ice.
It was during one such adventure when he was ten or eleven years old the boy was caught in a heavy rainstorm, brought by prevailing southerly winds that gather strength over a thousand miles of sea before crashing into Hána and falling on the High Country. It is these rains that nourish the river Hán, the lifeblood of the island and the power of its people: but to Tara the storm was a danger, for he had no shelter and home was many miles away.
From the heights of the valley the boy clambered downhill through thick murky undergrowth and along little streams and around fallen giant mountain ash trees, each grey trunk as wide as a house. Just downhill was the sawmill, where men turned these great trees into hardwood for the shipyards of Atatoka. Yet a journey that did not seem far in the daylight now seemed endless in the grey heavy rain. Cold water ran down his neck and down his back. His feet were heavy and sodden. He heard the screeching call of a white parrot, the reply of another, the sound of his own panicked breathing. Soon he reached a creek which earlier had been no more than knee deep. Already the rain had swollen it into a fast, frothing torrent.
Dismayed, he sat beneath a tall tree fern with his knees to his chest. Raindrops pelted the earth. Small rivulets flowed through the mud and dead bracken of the forest floor. The soft broad fronds overhead drooped with water. There was the rich smell of damp rainforest, the echoing chime of birdcall, a gathering gloom.
Soon he began to shiver, for he was wet, the wind cut through his clothing, and he was afraid of his mother’s anger and most of all the dark. Though in those days the hours of darkness were still late and short, to a child grown up on myths from the Dawn and rumours of the coming Nightfall it would not seem so.
High above him the huge grey trunks of the mountain ash bent silently in a high wind. Great ruins were hidden in these forests, huge places carved out of the earth and built from stones only giants could have moved. Perhaps giants moved them still. The boy thought fearfully of such beings, and of dark creatures and sprites from myths and tales.
There was no way home except over the raging water. Nor would any others venture here, for even the wardens now avoided the rainforest at night. He closed his eyes and listened to the rhythmic patter of the rain on the forest floor, to the churn and wash of the water. The soft trunk of the tree fern pressed against his back.
Then, almost imperceptibly, the rainforest seemed to change. The raging water, the rush of wind, the clatter of branches: all rushed and ebbed together, the voice of each coming and passing until all voices ran into a constant hurrying flow.
Tara listened, unsteady and unsure, for it now seemed he stood on a sunlit riverbank, and beyond there was only a roaring torrent of light, a current in which he would immerse and drown.
He opened his eyes. A sun-spirit stood a few paces from him. It had taken the soft and shimmering form of a bear, though its pure white eyes held no malice or warning. A bright haze filled the air. All the rainforest seemed to flow in harmony around the spirit, as if it stood in the middle of the sunlit current.
Though his people worshipped these white-eyed gods of the Light and the priests shared their powers, to see one revealed was rare and terrifying. Tara remained motionless in its steady gaze.
The sun-bear lowered its great head. Sunbeams broke through the clouds and treetops and caught the white-winged flash of a darting parrot. Filled with new warmth and without thought Tara stood and walked towards the spirit. It watched him come, white eyes deep with knowledge, all the forest carrying him, and he sensed a sadness in it; but he had only to touch the stream for the warmth in him to grow, for the wind to cease, for him to sense all the great movement, until the spirit vanished and he found himself standing in the fields above his home, yellow light pouring from a window into the surrounding dusk, a white glow fading from his eyes.
Thus the tide of all the world changed in an instant. This was the moment the boy received the gift of the light-magic, the precipice from which Tara fell helplessly towards his great fate. Though he did not know it at the time, nor do the stories now tell of what came before: a lonely child who like many others sought only to be seen, and to be heard.
Author Bio: I am 32 and I live on Bunurong country in south-east Melbourne with my wife, newborn son, and dog. I am a publisher for a small independent media company. In my spare time I enjoy hiking, climbing, sailing, and of course writing, inspired by my favourite author Ursula K Le Guin.