The Ancients

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They crossed the tidal flat ahead of the incoming, three shapes each smaller than the last - a little boy following his big sisters. Behind, their dark footsteps were lost to the creeping reflection of sky. Their world fallen silent: no birds, no boils of fish, only the unbroken water beyond this brink of land and the mud sucking at their calloused feet.

'Come on,' the eldest called with a boot kept dry in each hand, and the thin-necked boy shouted, 'I can't! I'm stuck!'

He had never tried crossing the bay at low tide. Never thought to leave home under the slanted light of dusk. None of this was right - he knew that. The gale turned the sweat on his neck to ice and there was muck to his knees and why leave home with night so near? Just yesterday his mother promised everything would be okay and now his boots were in his hands.

His middle sister returned for him. She was panting when she took him by the elbow. 'We'll cross together.' She tossed the hair from her face and he heard the clatter of shells and beads. A band of blue pigment ran ear to ear across her nose. A maiden now when only a week before she had been a clean-faced girl. She said, 'Don't make sister angry.'

'Hurry!' the oldest yelled. She was as tall as their father and her hands were rough like his and the same protruding vein divided her forehead. 'Tide's catching up. You get wet and you'll freeze!'

* * *

He followed his sisters from the mud onto dry sand, across the flank of a dune, through the crisp limbs of a dead orchard, past the drying racks once used for fish but now abandoned, and across the sandy flat that was before a black-soiled garden of maize and squash and beans, herbs and garlic, tubers and flowers. Here, where kids used to play when there were still kids. He could remember the barking dogs, the laughter, the heavy warmth of a full belly. All the singing - he had always wanted to be old enough to join the men in their singing.

'This way,' Leerit - the oldest - demanded. She was faster through the abandoned village, her steps two of his. Her feet left deep, toe-heavy tracks he would recognize anywhere.

The houses had begun falling in on themselves, the mud and its seagrass binder piled within ribs of wood used as corner posts and trusses. Twenty-four homes, each built around a central hearth, most with three wings where children and old people and dogs could sleep together under wood heat. All now disappearing into sand.

The path led to the only structure still intact. Leerit swept aside the hide curtain and ducked within. As big as their home and yet she lived here alone, his eldest sister. He knew he could never be so brave, brave enough to sleep alone.

Maren, his middle sister, pulled her hands inside her sleeves and crossed her arms. The bright beads in her hair were clacking with the wind. 'What are we doing?' she asked. 'There's a storm coming. Brother's cold.'

It was true, Kushim realized. He was cold. He sat on frigid sand and brushed the crumbles of tide from his shins and slipped on the furlined boots his mother had made for him. Their warmth, like hers, was immediate.

Leerit reappeared and tucked her knife into her belt and slung a satchel over her shoulder and freed her long locks from under the strap. Her neck was as thick as her jaw, her shoulders wide with muscle. She glanced toward the horizon. 'We're leaving.'

'Why?' Maren's nose was narrower, her eyes more delicate, her lashes long and curling. 'Shouldn't we wait?' She wrapped an arm about Kushim and said to their big sister, 'You're scaring him.'

Leerit turned from the angry ocean. 'I said we're leaving.'

Then even Maren stopped answering his questions. Where were their parents? Why leave home? When their parents came back and found them missing, then what? 'Please,' he begged. 'Just tell me what's happening!'

Maren grabbed him. 'Enough! Be quiet!'

Leerit was watching from atop a boulder. She used one lock to tie the rest of her hair together at the back of her head. Her hand adjusted the knife in her waistband. Sweat was streaking through her pigments. Kushim asked his adult sister, 'Maybe they went to find everyone else?'

Leerit's eyes fell to him. Her pigments needed fixing, but instead she passed a sleeve across one eye and her skin showed through. She did the same with the other eye then brought the belly of her robe up to clean the remaining pigment from her face. This was his sister become a stranger.

When she turned and kept going, what choice was there but to follow?

Leerit didn't stop again until a rushing tributary where the water was too fast to wade. She took one look and heaved her satchel across and leapt the rapid as if it were nothing. Then she called back for them from that face naked of markings. Her mouth made no sound for the roar. His sister's eyes were colorless in that dusk.

Maren wasn't thinking of him; she was studying the place she would land. Then her back foot lifted from the ground, and Kushim was left alone on that bank. His sisters were now together without him. Their mouths opening, Leerit waving, Maren's arms outstretched toward him. If he didn't jump, he would be alone.

Kushim backed up. He looked where he wanted to land and ran. The blur of the rapid was under him and he already knew he wouldn't make it.

His boots splashed into the stream and he was under, water in his ears. Skidding, his elbow colliding with flowstone, kicking but finding no ground, drowning, this is drowning - until a breath of air.

Something had caught his hood and the current swung him around into the shallows. Fingers dug into his armpits: it was Leerit dragging him through the brush, limbs cracking under her big feet.

When he finally stood, water poured from his sleeves. It had filled his boots and ears. Already his hands quivered with this cold beyond cold. A cold like burning. Not even cold was how it should be anymore.

Leerit hated him now. 'I told you not to get wet.'

Hail like sizzling fat. Maren flipped up her hood but too late, and pellets melted against her spine. She could do nothing to stop their trickle of cold.

Together, she and Leerit had pulled Kushim from his wet clothes and wrapped him inside the bearskin. He'd been shaking violently and talking to people not there.

It was madness to be out here now. Leerit, who was practically a woman - who would be a woman with a spouse if the village hadn't left - she was the reason they were here now. Maren asked the big sister she had always admired, 'Please just tell me why.'

An ember dropped from its tube and flames licked through tinder and Leerit's face was born new from the dark.

Maren tried to stop shivering. 'When they come back and we're gone, what then?'

Leerit added lengths of dry willow and stems of sage and blew light into the fire. Her hands somehow moved about the flames without burning. Leerit's voice was deeper this night. 'We need more wood. Dry his clothes. Get the meat and make him eat some. Wake him and make him eat. I need him strong tomorrow.'

Maren gripped her big sister's elbow and was surprised to find it wet. Of course. Soaked from when she jumped into the stream to save Kushim. 'You're freezing.'

Leerit pulled free and strode into the night, and Maren was left alone with the hail and the struggling flames and the bearskin that was rising and falling with her brother's breaths. For the first time in her life, she couldn't hear waves breaking.

Maren took a maize patty and a strip of elk jerky from Leerit's satchel and saw her own hand trembling. 'Kush. Wake up. Everything's going to be okay.'

'It hurts,' the boy mumbled.

'Wake up and eat, okay? Then you'll be warmer. Eat, then you can sleep.'

His hand appeared and she gave it meat and maize. Someone had to take care of the boy. This is what she should do. Their mother, if she was here, would soothe him with a bedtime story. Something about summer, an adventure of Opi's when he was this age, a story of bounty beside the Sea. 'Take a bite and I'll tell you something.'

By then the hail was turning to rain. Months without and now rain splashed up from the ground. Kushim whimpered, 'I'm so...